The Habit of Being Letters of Flannery O'Connor [Paperback]

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Special Award

I have come to think that the true likeness of Flannery O'Connor will be painted by herself, a self-portrait in words, to be found in her letters . . . There she stands, a phoenix risen from her own words: calm, slow, funny, courteous, both modest and very sure of herself, intense, sharply penetrating, devout but never pietistic, downright, occasionally fierce, and honest in a way that restores honor to the word. Sally Fitzgerald, from the Introduction

Introduction by Sally Fitzgerald

Part I: Up North and Getting Home
1948-1952

Part II: Day In and Day Out
1953-1958

Part III: The Violent Bear It Away
1959-1963

Part IV: The Last Year
1964

Index

Flannery O'Connor(1925-1964) was one of Americas most gifted writers. She wrote two novels,Wise BloodandThe Violent Bear It Away, and two story collections,A Good Man Is Hard to FindandEverything That Rises Must Converge. HerComplete Stories, published posthumously in 1972, won the National Book Award that year, and in a 2009 online poll it was voted as the best book to have won the award in the contest's 60-year history. Her essays were published inMystery and Mannersand her letters inThe Habit of Being.

Reading Flannery O'Connor's letters, one feels the living presence in them. Their tone, their content, and even the number of those she corresponded with, reveal the vivid life that was in her, and much of the quality of a personality often badly guessed at.

To compare her with the great letter writers in our language may seem presumptuous and would have elicited from her one of her famous steely glances, but Byron, Keats, Lawrence, Wilde and Joyce come irresistibly to mind: correspondence that gleams with consciousness. The New York Times

These hundreds of letters give O'Connor's tough, funny, careful personality to us more dilÃ%