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By Root 1496 0

in 2003, an editor asked me if I had ever considered writing another biography, because I had since written about the poet Frank O’Hara. My first thought: Whatever happened to the biography of Flannery O’Connor? Sally Fitzgerald had died in June 2000, at the age of eighty-three, leaving behind an unfinished manuscript that has yet to appear. As my personal test for deciding on projects has always been to write the book that I want to read but cannot find on the shelf, I could think of no better choice. So I simply began with an exploratory trip to O’Connor’s childhood home in Savannah, Georgia.

Of course the Flannery O’Connor of 2003 was a far more canonic figure than the Flannery O’Connor of 1980. With each passing year, her status as “minor” has been adjusted upward, as her stories have been anthologized, and more high school and college students discover her work. Among their professors, she has become a one-woman academic industry: as of 2008, the Modern Language Association catalogued 1,340 entries under O’Connor, including 195 doctoral dissertations and seventy book-length studies. The annual Flannery O’Connor Bulletin — now Flannery O’Connor Review — begun in 1972, is entirely devoted to critical reevaluations of her work. An important indicator of this shifting assessment was her inclusion as the first postwar woman writer in the Library of America series; her 1988 volume widely outsold Faulkner’s, published three years earlier.

Most startling during my six years of writing this book has been the accompanying spike in interest in O’Connor in popular culture — formerly the domain, according to her, of Miss Watermelon of 1955. John Huston’s 1979 adaptation of Wise Blood is a Netflix staple. Bruce Springsteen has credited O’Connor as the inspiration for his album Nebraska. On The Charlie Rose Show, Conan O’Brien, who wrote his senior thesis at Harvard on O’Connor, spoke of her as “one of the funniest, darkest writers in American history . . . I was drawn to her.” (The actor Tommy Lee Jones, too, wrote a senior paper at Harvard on O’Connor.) Andalusia Farm is now a literary shrine, open to the public. O’Connor’s books have been published in translation in more than forty countries: her fame has become global. My daily “Google Alert” for “Flannery O’Connor” attests that the phrase “like something out of Flannery O’Connor” is now accepted shorthand, like “Kafkaesque” before it, for nailing many a funny, dark, askew moment.

GIVING THE LIE to the stereotype of Flannery O’Connor as an eccentric recluse is the number of her friends, classmates, and relatives who shared anecdotes and lively memories with me throughout my research and writing. I found their voices touching, funny, and full of insight, and this book would have lacked much vital spirit without them. Making the following “list of credits” even longer is the inclusion of all the librarians, archivists, curators, scholars, experts, and admirers of various kinds who have devoted so much energy to further understanding, often without having ever met O’Connor, but having been drawn into her force field by stories read early on and never forgotten. To anyone I inadvertently left out, my apologies, and thanks.

In Savannah, I was greatly helped from the outset by the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home Foundation, especially its directors and officers Rena Patton, Robert Strozier, Carl Weeks, and Bill Dawers, my trusty guide to contemporary Savannah. Mrs. Hugh R. Brown, diocesan archivist, opened to me the O’Connor family church records, and gave me access to an informative essay and panel interviews conducted by her late husband, Hugh R. Brown. I was pleased to speak with O’Connor’s second cousin Patricia Persse and other Savannah childhood friends and acquaintances: Jane Harty Abbott, Alice Carr, Angela Dowling, Dan O’Leary, Newell Turner Parr, and Sister Jude Walsh. For historical background, I was given many materials by the Georgia Historical Society, and by Mark MacDonald at the Historic Savannah Foundation. I am grateful to Dale and Lila Critz, the current owners