"Excellent...Mr. Gooch's is patient and tactful with the publicity-shy and dauntingly complex O'Connor. His book is a welcome introduction to the quiet, narrow life of a fiercely funny and unnervingly powerful writer."--Adam Begley , The New York Observer Booklist (starred review) David Ulin , Los Angeles Times Library Journal The New Yorker Joyce Carol Oates , New York Review of Books Time Flannery so valuable is the degree of intimacy with which it captures O'Connor's sensibility."--Janet Maslin , New York Times Floyd Skloot , The Boston Globe Charles Matthews , The Houston Chronicle
"In his engaging, sympathetic, and yet intellectually scrupulous biography of O'Connor, Brad Gooch provides the ideal biographical commentary."
Joyce Carol Oates - New York Review of Books
"This is one of those rare biographies that makes the writer almost as fascinating as what she wrote."
Charles Matthews - The Houston Chronicle
"Impressive. . . Gooch's account is meticulous."
"It's incredible that this is the first biography of the great Southern writer Flannery O'Connor.... As Brad Gooch shows, her life was as dark and rich and dense with meaning as her fiction is."
"The story Gooch tells is amply shaded and evocatively detailed...It is a poignant, inspiring story of one brave, dedicated, brilliant writer."
Floyd Skloot - The Boston Globe
"Excellent...Mr. Gooch's is patient and tactful with the publicity-shy and dauntingly complex O'Connor. His book is a welcome introduction to the quiet, narrow life of a fiercely funny and unnervingly powerful writer."
Adam Begley - The New York Observer
"Gooch is brilliant on [O'Connor's] fiction, passionate and smart, able to contextualize both the individual pieces and the scope of the career."
David Ulin - Los Angeles Times
"Rapt, authoritative...What makes Flannery so valuable is the degree of intimacy with which it captures O'Connor's sensibility."
Janet Maslin - New York Times
"Gooch comfortably traces [Flannery O'Connor's] fiction to its real-life roots in a meticulous yet seemingly effortless writing style, resulting in the definitive biography as well as providing the impetus for general readers to return to O'Connor's timeless fiction."
Booklist (starred review)
In his engaging, sympathetic, and yet intellectually scrupulous biography of O'Connor, Brad Gooch provides the ideal biographical commentary.New York Review of Books
This is one of those rare biographies that makes the writer almost as fascinating as what she wrote.The Houston Chronicle
The story Gooch tells is amply shaded and evocatively detailed...It is a poignant, inspiring story of one brave, dedicated, brilliant writer.The Boston Globe
Excellent...Mr. Gooch's is patient and tactful with the publicity-shy and dauntingly complex O'Connor. His book is a welcome introduction to the quiet, narrow life of a fiercely funny and unnervingly powerful writer.The New York Observer
Gooch is brilliant on [O'Connor's] fiction, passionate and smart, able to contextualize both the individual pieces and the scope of the career.Los Angeles Times
Rapt, authoritative...What makes Flannery so valuable is the degree of intimacy with which it captures O'Connor's sensibility. New York Times
Gooch comfortably traces [Flannery O'Connor's] fiction to its real-life roots in a meticulous yet seemingly effortless writing style, resulting in the definitive biography as well as providing the impetus for general readers to return to O'Connor's timeless fiction.
Reading the biographies of both O’Connor and Lowell might disappoint some of Carlene Bauer’s fans as the fictional license she took will be fully revealed. O’Connor and Lowell were friends, but never lovers, and Frances’s life progresses in ways O’Connor herself never had the chance to experience. However, others might enjoy learning more about the lives of these two powerhouse artists. Mariani’s biography of Lowell covers the expected features of his relationships, illness, and life history (including his position as a member of one of the oldest European families in the U.S.), but is most notable for its attention to Lowell’s poetry, work habits, and reading life. Gooch’s biography of O’Connor details her life and illness, her circle of friends, her Southern roots and religious devotions, as well as her profoundly influential and controversial work and its legacy.
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[Gooch] has done an earnest, respectful but mercifully not hagiographic job…the book is for the most part lucidly written and neither excessively long nor riddled with extraneous detail…Whether Gooch's conscientious, respectful biography will bring new readers to her work is doubtful, since literary biographies rarely sell as well as their authors and publishers wish, but readers who already know that work will be glad to have it.
Gooch (City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara ) offers a surprisingly bloodless biography of Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964), who, despite the author's diligent scholarship, remains enigmatic. She emerges only in her excerpted letters, speeches and fiction, where she is as sharp-tongued, censorious, piteously observant and mordantly funny as her beloved short stories. There is little genuinely interesting new material, but there are small gems-the full story of O'Connor's friendship with the mysterious A. of her letters, for instance. Perhaps mindful of the writer's dislike of being exposed in print, Gooch errs on the side of delicacy; he does not sufficiently explore her attitudes toward blacks and how the early onset of lupus left her sequestered on her mother's Georgia farm, without the "male companionship" she craved. Instead, he plumbs O'Connor's fiction for buried fragments of her daily life, and the revelations are hardly astonishing. Readers looking for more startling tidbits will be disappointed by this account that brims with the quiet satisfactions the author took in her industry ("I sit all day typing and grinning like the Cheshire cat"), her faith, friends and stoic approach to a debilitating disease. 16 pages of b&w photos. (Feb. 25)
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Taut biography of the iconic Southern short-story writer and novelist. Building on scholarly research and O'Connor's work, biographer/novelist Gooch (English/William Paterson Univ.; Godtalk: Travels in Spiritual America, 2002, etc.) delivers a sound appraisal of the author best known for her racially charged, tragicomic, unsentimental portraits of the South. The only child of devoutly Catholic parents, O'Connor (1925-64) was raised among affluent whites in Milledgeville, Ga., where the local penitentiary, insane asylum and elite Georgia State College for Women (she was class of '45) helped shape her literary landscape. In 1946, O'Connor gained admission to the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her perfectly pitched sagas about religious fanatics and backwoods eccentrics quickly established her as a writer of uncommon talent and reach. O'Connor's blithe use of the epithet "nigger" in her fiction and vast correspondence also made her a controversial figure in American letters, then and now. Stricken with lupus in her mid-20s, she retreated to Andalusia, her family's sprawling farm on the outskirts of Milledgeville. There, under the dutiful, if challenging care of her widowed mother, she crafted such scintillatingly sardonic stories as "Good Country People," "Revelation" and "Everything That Rises Must Converge." She also began to breed the exotic peacocks now routinely linked with her name. Gooch offers little that has not been previously examined in scores of works on the larger-than-life author, dead at 39. Nor does he indulge those who like juicy gossip in their literary bios. He gives short shrift to the speculation surrounding O'Connor's ardent correspondence with lesbianjournalist Betty Hester, and quotes the Danish-born textbook salesman who befriended her in the '50s dismissing rumors of their alleged sexual liaison. Unlike its subject, respectably tame. Agent: Joy Harris/Joy Harris Agency
"O'Connor lives and breathes--and spits fire--in Brad Gooch's portrait of the too short life of the peacock-loving writer who dealt in the dark grotesqueries of human nature."
Elissa Schappell - Vanity Fair
O'Connor lives and breathes—and spits fire—in Brad Gooch's portrait of the too short life of the peacock-loving writer who dealt in the dark grotesqueries of human nature.Vanity Fair
