For the past couple of weeks, I've been falling asleep with, waking up with, and riding the bus with Brad Gooch's new Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor. I finished my time with it this morning, and now I need to get it back to the library so that five other people on the waiting list can start their own stretches with Gooch's fine biography. This author has been so familiar to me for nearly forty years, that I sometimes forget that she really isn't all that well known, which is too bad.

My first experience with her stories was through a high school class when I was about fifteen, and it happened to be the first entry in a little paperback anthology, Contemporary American Short Stories, that also included stories by Bernard Malamud, John Cheever, Tillie Olsen, and several other American writers of the 1950s and 60s. "Greenleaf" is the story of O'Connor's in that little volume (which I still own, and have on my knee, at this very moment), a tale set on a farm in rural Georgia that was very much like the farm where O'Connor lived with her mother for the last several years of her life. She writes about rather stunted Southern intellectuals who keep to themselves, about self-righteous parents of an earlier generation, and about directionless, or sometimes misdirected working class Southerners. And all of these sorts come together and clash in sometimes very unfortunate ways. There is snarky humor to be found in all of her stories, and also in the novel that she wrote in her early twenties, Wise Blood, the tale of a demented young man who decides to be a sort of preacher, all on his own in the landscape of a changing American South.

Although there have been hundreds of articles written about O'Connor, and several volumes of her collected writings published over the past forty years, this is the first authoritative biography. Gooch made quite a name for himself a few years ago with a biography of the poet Frank O'Hara, and that gave him enough capital in the literary and publishing world that he was taken quite seriously when he embarked on writing a life story of Flannery O'Connor. His research was clearly exhaustive, going back to her native Savannah, Georgia and not only interviewing old Catholic schoolmates of his subject, but even delving into school records to check her grades, dates of enrollment, etc. And then he continued with her move with family to Atlanta, where she spent a good bit of her childhood and teen years; to University of Iowa in Iowa City, where O'Connor was among the first students in their famous writing workshop; to the Yaddo Arts Colony in upstate New York; to buildings where she lived for short periods in New York City; and finally to Milledgeville, Georgia, where her family has had roots since the mid-19th century. O'Connor was Catholic, single, and afflicted with the auto-immune disease, lupus, which eventually killed her when she was 39, in 1964. Gooch clearly loves O'Connor's work and the idea and facts of her life, which I do, also. Something he opens up for me is her personal life as an adult, explaining and exploring her relationships with both men and women, that encompassed as much love that O'Connor could manage, although she probably died without ever having shared a bed with any of them. This is a terrific book, and I highly recommend it to anyone who's an admirer of Flannery O'Connor.