Where to start?

Someone wrote me and asked - if I've never read Flannery O'Connor before, where do I start?

That's a good and important question, because if you start reading O'Connor in the wrong place or the wrong frame of mind, you won't get her now or maybe even ever. There are lots of people who have read O'Connor and just don't like her writing, and don't see what in the world the rest of us are raving about. Which is fine, because we have to admit to each his own. Henry James makes me look for toothpicks to prop my eyelids open.

If you're serious about trying to read O'Connor intelligently, I really think you need to have, besides the fiction, two other works - Mystery and Manners, a collection of her writings on writing and faith, and her letters, collected in The Habit of Being, and also available in the Library of America complete collection of her works.

There is always the danger of over-analysis coming between the reader and author, a danger of which O'Connor was keenly aware.

(Read her letter of March 28, 1961, to a professor of English who shared with O'Connor his students' interpretation of "A Good Man is Hard to Find." Her letter begins: "The interpretation of your ninety students and three teachers is fantastic and about as far from my intentions as it could get to be." It ends: "Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it. My tone is not meant to be obnoxious. I am in a state of shock.")

But the idea of reading a bit of MM and having the letters close by is not to "interpret" but merely to understand what O'Connor herself was trying to do.

So once you have all volumes in hand, I would recommend starting with the following stories, for reasons that I cannot defend, except perhaps that they are the most accessible:

"A Good Man is Hard to Find"
"A Temple of the Holy Ghost" (very funny, and the most explicitly "Catholic" of O'Connor's stories in terms of character and setting.)
"The River" (A heartbreaker, but about baptism, if you can see through the sadness)
"The Displaced Person"
"Revelation"
"Parker's Back"

Then, if you've a mind to, go to Wise Blood, the first of her two novels. And then move on from there.

Me on O'Connor: "Stalking Pride"

J. Bottum on the rather unbelievable incident a couple of years back in which some Catholic schools in Louisiana banned the reading of O'Connor.

A number of other O'Connor resources.

And, if you can find it in your library stacks, read the review of the LOC O'Connor Collected Works by Mary Jo Salter in the 4/24/89 issue of The New Republic. It's very good.

The stories are hard, but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism…When I see these stories described as horror stories, I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.

Comments

[Gerard E.]

She is THE American Catholic novelist. The one shining entry we can point to with pride from the WW I- Vietnam War Era of Literature who can sit at the same table with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, etc. Tough to swallow at first- makes the reader wonder if she was just the ultimate cynic. Then the discovery that she had bigger fish to fry.

[Sean Gallagher]

When I took a foundational theology class once, we were assigned to read "Revelation" in the course to help us better understand the nature of divine revelation.

[David]

There's a blog of quotes from Ms. O'Connor at

http://flanneryoconnor.blogspot.com/

[David]

Here's another page on O'Connor:

http://library.gcsu.edu/~sc/foc.html

[Kenny]

What was the 1961 class' interpretation of "A good man is Hard to Find"?

[Ian]

Amy,

Dig the "Saint of the Day" today... :)

[RC]

"Good Country People" is wickedly funny, with its take on a godless Northeast-educated intellectual gal stuck on the farm among those naive Christians.

[Karen Howard]

There's also the John Huston film of "Wise Blood".

[Maclin Horton]

Amy,

This is not a disagreement with your choices, but "Good Country People" and "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" would be in my top half-dozen or so. I think of these probably at least once a week, the latter especially in connection with the not-infrequent moments when I notice myself wanting to call down fire from heaven on the heads of various sinners other than myself, the former whenever I encounter a blowhard nihilist intellectual. (And all during the Clinton administration I kept seeing Bill as Manley Pointer to said intellectual's Hulga.)

Gerard E.,

No argument about O'Connor's quality, but I don't think she's the one: I think Walker Percy is just as good, and just as Catholic but in a very different way.

[amy]

Oh yes, Maclin, I was just offering my suggestions, which are just mine - and yours are just as good if not better!

[Rich Leonardi]

Barnes & Noble Books put out a handsome collection of her short stories that's cheap ($10) and pretty easy to find.

[mark]

I've always had a special attachment to "The Lame Shall Enter First". To me it is heartbreaking rather than melodramatic. Anyone have any thoughts?

[tcreek]

"The Habit of Being" and "Mystery and Manners" are certainly must reading for anyone trying to grasp the meanings behind O'Connor's writings. Even then she is still difficult for many. Here are some books that were a help to me. Even then aggravation still sets in while rereading O'Connor because I know I am missing some of her intent.

Flannery O'Connor: The Woman, The Thinker, The Visionary – by Ted Spivey
Flannery O'Connor: A Proper Scaring - by Jill Pelaez Baumgaertner
Flannery O'Connor: An Introduction – by Miles Orvell
Flannery O'Connor: The Imagination of Extremity - by Frederick Asals
The Art and Vision of Flannery O'Connor - by Robert Brinkmeyer
Flannery O'Connor: In Celebration of Genius – 20 essays, edited by Sarah Gordon
Conversations with Flannery O'Connor – 16 essays, edited by Rosemary M. Magee
Flannery O'Connor: New Perspectives - 10 essays, edited by Sura Rath and Mary Neff Shaw
Flannery O'Connor: A Study of the Short Fiction - Suzanne Morrow Paulson
Flannery O'Connor: A life - biography by Jean W. Cash

[Gardner]

And check out "Flannery O'Connor and the Christ Haunted South" by Ralph Woods. It's a tremendous cultural critique and examination through the pen and lens of O'Connor. I'm saying this as one having been raised and still living in the "terribly and wonderfully" Christ-haunted South, which I love.