Terry Teachout -- known as the chief drama critic for the WSJ and his terrific blog, About Last Night -- recently published an article "Believing in Flannery O'Connor" in Commentary Magazine online. It's a compelling and thoughtful article because Teachout drives home the point of her importance and durability in American Letters (so many contemporary short story authors still claim her as their most important influence) and the continuing misunderstanding of the point of her work "in an age of increasingly militant secularism." It's really a great piece on O'Connor.
And I'd like to take this moment to reccommend reading A Habit of Being, her collected letters which are incredible. She has much in those letters to offer new writers (on staying committed to one's work, one's voice), on the craft (so many of her letters reveal a great deal about how she wrote her short stories and labored over every detail), her Catholic faith (which is as tough and unsentimental as it gets), and her considerable humor -- the letters at times, even some of those written in the hospital when she was suffering from Lupus, are hilarious.
Joy Williams, writing a review in the NYT of Brad Gooch's new biography of O'Connor (also highly reccommended) said this of her:
"Strangely innocent indeed. Also, forbidding, doctrinaire, witty, obsessed and almost inhumanly brave as her illness ground her along on her long passage to death. In the hospital the spring before she died, she worked between blood transfusions — she joked that she was hearing a celestial chorus but the song, over and over, was “Clementine” — correcting the galleys of the marvelous short story “Revelation” and completing another, “Parker’s Back,” which she had been working on and revising for years. Always, always in her work, she struggled to find the delivering image, the delivering word that would offer “experienced meaning.”"
