Flannery O'Connor

Disturbing, ironic, haunting, brutal. What inner struggles led Flannery OConnor to create fiction that elicits such labels? Much of the tension that drives OConnors writing, says Sarah Gordon, stems from the natural resistance of her imagination to the obedience expected by her male-centered church, society, and literary background. Flannery OConnor: The Obedient Imagination shows us a writer whose world was steeped in male presumption regarding women and creativity. The book is filled with fresh perspectives on OConnors Catholicism; her upbringing as a dutiful, upper-class southern daughter; her readings of Thurber, Poe, Eliot, and other arguably misogynistic authors; and her schooling in the New Criticism. As Gordon leads us through a world premised on expectations at odds with OConnors strong and original imagination, she ranges across all of OConnors fiction and many of her letters and essays. While acknowledging OConnors singular situation, Gordon also gleans insights from the lives and works of other southern writers, Eudora Welty, Caroline Gordon, and Margaret Mitchell among them. Flannery OConnor: The Obedient Imagination draws on Sarah Gordons thirty years of reading, teaching, and discussing one of our most complex and influential authors. It takes us closer than we have ever been to the creative struggles behind such literary masterpieces as Wise Blood and A Good Man Is Hard to Find.