2001 Choice Outstanding Academic Title A compelling study of O'Connor's fiction as illuminated by the teaching of the desert monastics. "Lord, I'm glad I'm a hermit novelist," Flannery O'Connor wrote to a friend in 1957. Sequestered by ill health, O'Connor spent the final thirteen years of her life on her isolated family farm in rural Georgia. During this productive time she developed a fascination with fourth-century Christians who retreated to the desert for spiritual replenishment and whose isolation, suffering, and faith mirrored her own. In Flannery O'Connor, Hermit Novelist, Richard Giannone explores O'Connor's identification with these early Christian monastics and the ways in which she infused her fiction with their teachings. Surveying the influences of the desert fathers on O'Connor's protagonists, Giannone shows how her characters are moved toward a radical simplicity of ascetic discipline as a means of confronting both internal and worldly evils while being drawn closer to God. Artfully bridging literary analysis, O'Connor's biography, and monastic writings, Giannone's study explores O'Connor's advocacy of self-denial and self-scrutiny as vital spiritual weapons that might be brought to bear against the antagonistic forces she found rampant in modern American life.

Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) is widely regarded as one of the great American writers of the twentieth century. Only in 1979, however, with the publication of her collected letters could the public fully see the depth of her personal faith and her wisdom as a spiritual guide. Drawing from all her works this anthology highlights as never before O'Connor's distinctive voice as a spiritual writer, covering such topics as Christian Realism, the Church, the relation between faith and art, sin and grace, and the role of suffering in the life of a Christian. This volume also includes the complete text of O'Connor's short story, Revelation. Book jacket.

"Everything That Rises Must Converge" (1965) is nine posthumous stories. The introduction is by Robert Fitzgerald.

"In Flannery O'Connor, Hermit Novelist, Richard Giannone explores O'Connor's identification with these early Christian monastics, a bond that stemmed from her faith as well as her own isolation and physical suffering from lupus, and the ways in which their strange, still voices illuminate her fiction.

Flannery O'Connor and Cold War Culture offers a radically new reading of O'Connor, who is known primarily as the creator of "universal" religious dramas. By recovering the historical context in which O'Connor wrote her fiction, Jon Lance Bacon reveals an artist deeply concerned with the issues that engaged other producers of American culture from the 1940s to the 1960s: a national identity, political anxiety, and intellectual freedom. Bacon takes an interdisciplinary approach, relating the stories and novels to political texts and sociological studies, as well as films, television programs, paintings, advertisements, editorial cartoons, and comic books. At a time when national paranoia ran high, O'Connor joined in the public discussion regarding a way of life that seemed threatened from outside - the American way of life. The discussion tended toward celebration, but O'Connor raised doubts about the quality of life within the United States. Specifically, she attacked the consumerism that cold warriors cited as evidence of American cultural superiority. The role of dissenter appealed greatly to O'Connor, and her identity as a Southern, Catholic writer - the very identity that has discouraged critics from considering her as an American writer - furnished a position from which to criticize the Cold War consensus.

Hidden—Richard Giannone’s searingly honest, richly insightful memoir—eloquently captures the author’s transformation from a solitary gay academic to a dedicated caregiver as well as a sexually and spiritually committed man. Always alone, always fearful, he initially resisted the duty to look after his dying female relatives. But his mother’s fall into dementia changed all that. Her vulnerability opened this middle-aged man to the love of another man, a former priest and Jersey boy like himself. Together the two men saw the old woman to her death and did the same for Giannone’s sister. In Hidden Giannone uncovers how, ultimately, these experiences moved him closer to participating in the vitality he believed pulsed in the world but had always eluded him. The mothering life of this gay partnership evolved alongside the AIDS crisis and within and against Italian American culture that reflected the Catholic Church’s discountenancing of homosexual love. Giannone vividly weaves his reflections on gay life in Greenwich Village and his spiritual journey as a gay man and Catholic into his experience of caring for the women of his family. In Hidden Giannone recounts a gripping religious conversion, drawing on the wisdom of the ancient desert mothers and fathers of Egypt and Palestine. Because he was raised a Catholic, the shift is not from nothing to something. Rather, it is away from the modeling power of institutional Christianity to the tempering influence of homosexuality on the Gospel. Gay or straight, so long as we remain hidden from ourselves, the true God remains hidden from us.

More than just a bibliography, this catalog of Flannery O'Connor's library is an invitation to better understand the ideas, passions, and prejudices of the extraordinarily observant and creative author of Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away. Noting all the passages O'Connor marked in her books, transcribing many of the passages, and showing all references to specific books in O'Connor's published letters and book reviews, Arthur F. Kinney gives readers the opportunity to hear the intellectual dialogue between O'Connor and the authors of the books in her library--authors as diverse as Carl Jung, Henry James, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. A rich assembly of books on philosophy, theology, literature, literary criticism, and other subjects, O'Connor's personal library was collected while she lived at the family farmhouse near Milledgeville, Georgia. Now housed at Georgia College and State University, it shows signs of her frequent use. Passages that aroused such emotions as joy, wrath, and mockery are marked with her stars, checks, numbers, and often more extensive comments. Providing a general intellectual context for understanding O'Connor's work, the markings and notations offer in some cases a direct guide to specific facets of her work. Helpful to anyone seeking to understand O'Connor, Flannery O'Connor's Library will prove indispensable to future study and criticism of one of the most complex and elusive twentieth-century American writers.