Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [182]
GCSU Flannery O’Connor Collection, Ina Dillard Russell Library, Georgia College and State University, Milledgeville.
Prince- Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Firestone Library, Prince ton ton University.
UI Records of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Special Collections, University of Iowa.
UNC “Dorrance Papers,” Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina Library, Chapel Hill.
Yaddo “Yaddo Records.” Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
EPIGRAPH
ix “As for biographies”: FOC to Betty Hester, July 5, 1958, HB, 290–91.
PROLOGUE: WALKING BACKWARD
3 “marked me for life”: FOC, “The King of the Birds,” CW, 832. Hilton Als retells the story as an example of “the first approval of her obsession with the grotesque” in “This Lonesome Place,” The New Yorker (January 29, 2001): 83
3 “the New Yorker”: “Notes,” CW, 1270.
3 “Miss Katie”: Loretta Feuger Hoynes, “We Remember Mary Flannery” panel, O’Connor Childhood Home, Savannah, Ga., November 2, 1990.
3–4 “Her fame had spread”: CW, 832. A slew of such new items, edging on tall tales, dotted the newspapers of the day, including the New York Times, which ran a piece titled “Advent of Spring in Georgia, Weird Nature Tales,” dateline “Savannah,” about a chicken born to a farmer in Lee County, Georgia, with four legs that could “walk forward or backward”: New York Times (May 30, 1930): E2.
4 “frizzled”: Sally Fitzgerald, “Chronology,” CW, 1238.
4 “the Pathé man”: CW, 832.
4 “Odd fowl walks”: “Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse,” Pathe News Reel Series, 1931, GCSU.
5 “celebrity”: FOC to Betty Hester, December 15, 1955, HB, 126.
5 “From that day”: CW, 832.
6 “Now there are”: Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, October 1, 1948, The Letters of Robert Lowell, edited by Saskia Hamilton (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 111.
7 “My quest”: CW, 832.
8 “dance forward”: Ibid., 835.
8 “dignified ferocity”: “Notes,” CW, 1270.
CHAPTER ONE: SAVANNAH
13 “element of ham”: FOC to Maryat Lee, Ground Hog Day, 1958, HB, 265.
13 “The things we see, hear, smell”: FOC, “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South,” CW, 855.
14 “unsettled”: Savannah Morning News (March 25, 1925): 1.
14 “Sinner Must Be Reborn”: Ibid., 11.
15 “I never was one”: FOC to Betty Hester, December 20, 1958, HB, 309.
16 “I was brought up”: FOC to Janet McKane, July 25, 1963, HB, 531.
16 “inmates”: Hugh R. Brown, “Flannery O’Connor, The Savannah Years,” unpublished essay, 6, private collection.
17 “We had a black cook”: Patricia Persse, in discussion with the author, Septem-ber 15, 2004.
17 “I remember the square”: Dan O’Leary, in discussion with the author, Septem-ber 15, 2004.
18 “It was so Catholic”: Brown, “Savannah Years,” 5.
19 “My first memories”: Katherine Groves, “We Remember Mary
Flannery” panel, O’Connor Childhood Home, Savannah, Ga., February 4, 1990.
21 “I don’t think mine”: FOC to Betty Hester, February 25, 1956, HB, 141.
21 “Mass was first said”: FOC to Janet McKane, May 17, 1963, HB, 520.
22 “a grand pyrotechnic display”: “Looking Back: 1890,” Union-Recorder.
22 “for the northern markets”: “Thirty Years Ago in Baldwin,” Union-Recorder, March 16, 1923.
22 “Little girl, what you got”: Alice Carr, in discussion with the author, Septem-ber 25, 2004.
22 “I don’t know anybody”: FOC to Father James H. McCown, April 3, 1956, HB, 142.
23 “interesting, quiet”: undated newspaper clipping, private collection.
23 “put on his white”: Sally Fitzgerald, “The Invisible Father,” Christianity and Literature 47, no. 1 (Autumn 1997): 15.
23 “a robust, amused”: Robert Fitzgerald, “Introduction,” Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O’Connor (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1965), x.
24 “The wedding will take place”: Savannah Morning News, October 8, 1922; following the marriage in Milledgeville, a Savannah wedding reception was held at the home of William Jay Harty on Gwinnett Street.
25 “There seems little doubt”: Sally Fitzgerald, “Invisible Father,