Books, Arts & Manners

Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works, selected and annotated by Sally Fitzgerald (Library of America, 1,281 pp., $30)

The inclusion of Flannery O’Connor in the Library of America series— she and William Faulkner are the only two contemporary writers represented there to date—inevitably prompts an official appraisal, as it were, of the literary stature of the woman Marion Montgomery has called “this remarkable creature who lived and flourished on a middle-Georgia farm,” dead these 24 years. In most of the reviews I have looked at, the reviewer handles the word “great” as gingerly as if it were a diamond pin he was thinking of presenting to a favorite mistress and replaces it finally, after further consideration, on the velvet. Greatness in a writer is as elusive and indefinable a quality as beauty in a woman, though Mr. Montgomery, in his book The Prophetic Poet and the Spirit of the Age: Why Flannery O’Connor Stayed Home, goes so far as—or no further than—to say this: “If Flannery O’Connor’s poetry lacks the grandeur we find in Shakespeare, it does not lack a profundity, a vision worthy of comparison.” Was Miss O’Connor a “great” writer—a writer, that is, to be placed squarely in the company of Hawthorne and James, Hemingway and Faulkner? I believe that she was. Of one thing, though, I have no doubt at all: great writer or not, she was consistently one of the finest literary artists to appear in this (or any) country in this century.

CW

About the Author

Chilton Williamson Jr.

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Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works, selected and annotated by Sally Fitzgerald (Library of America, 1,281 pp., $30)

The inclusion of Flannery O’Connor in the Library of America series— she and William Faulkner are the only two contemporary writers represented there to date—inevitably prompts an official appraisal, as it were, of the literary stature of the woman Marion Montgomery has called “this remarkable creature who lived and flourished on a middle-Georgia farm,” dead these 24 years. In most of the reviews I have looked at, the reviewer handles the word “great” as gingerly as if it were a diamond pin he was thinking of presenting to a favorite mistress and replaces it finally, after further consideration, on the velvet. Greatness in a writer is as elusive and indefinable a quality as beauty in a woman, though Mr. Montgomery, in his book The Prophetic Poet and the Spirit of the Age: Why Flannery O’Connor Stayed Home, goes so far as—or no further than—to say this: “If Flannery O’Connor’s poetry lacks the grandeur we find in Shakespeare, it does not lack a profundity, a vision worthy of comparison.” Was Miss O’Connor a “great” writer—a writer, that is, to be placed squarely in the company of Hawthorne and James, Hemingway and Faulkner? I believe that she was. Of one thing, though, I have no doubt at all: great writer or not, she was consistently one of the finest literary artists to appear in this (or any) country in this century.