He also takes us back to those heady days after the war when O'Connor studied creative writing at Iowa. With elegance and fairness, Gooch deals with the sensitive areas of race and religion in O'Connor's life. Praise for Flannery: Flannery O'Connor, one of the best American writers of short fiction, has found her ideal biographer in Brad Gooch. O'Connor's capacity to live fully - despite the chronic disease that eventually confined her to her mother's farm in Georgia - is illuminated in this engaging and authoritative biography. Hester was famously known as A in O'Connor's collected letters, The Habit of Being, and a large cache of correspondence to her from O'Connor was made available to scholars, including Brad Gooch, in 2006. Brad Gooch brings to life O'Connor's significant friendships - with Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Walker Percy, and James Dickey among others - and her deeply felt convictions, as expressed in her communications with Thomas Merton, Elizabeth Bishop, and Betty Hester. Her fierce, sometimes comic novels and stories reflected the darkly funny, vibrant, and theologically sophisticated woman who wrote them. Item #270734 ISBN: 0316000663 The landscape of American literature was fundamentally changed when Flannery O'Connor stepped onto the scene with her first published book, Wise Blood, in 1952. Little, Brown and Company, February 2009. GOOCH, BRAD Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor

Flannery by Brad Gooch