Southern Gothic

In the epigraph that opens
Flannery, Gooch quotes O'Connor as certain "there won't be any biographies of me because .  .  . lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy."

Ironically, her confinement at Andalusia left biographers with a treasure trove of her gorgeously descriptive and meditative letters to draw on. It is clear from these letters that O'Connor's life is more intriguing (and difficult to encapsulate) than the famously averse-to-fame writer ever supposed. (She once said that she'd rather consign herself to "Hell's fire on this earth" than accept the designation "famous writer.") O'Connor was once asked during a television interview if she might not like to offer a synopsis of her story, "The Life You Save Might Be Your Own."

"No, I certainly would not," she responded. "I don't think you can paraphrase a story like that. I think there's only one way to tell it, and that's the way it's told in the story."

Shawn Macomber is a writer in Philadelphia.