A Prayer Journal Author: Visit Amazon's Flannery O'Connor Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0374236917 | Format: PDF
A Prayer Journal Description
From Booklist
Those familiar with O’Connor’s oeuvre know that her strong Roman Catholic faith informs all her work. This is one reason that her recently discovered prayer journal, penned while she attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1947 and 1948, is such a significant find. Although extremely brief, this series of heartfelt prayers and musings offered up by one of the most gifted writers of her generation provides a uniquely intimate glimpse into the heart, soul, and mind of a deeply religious genius. Guaranteed to excite American-literature buffs and O’Connor scholars, this slim volume also includes photocopies of the original handwritten texts. --Margaret Flanagan
From Bookforum
There's an intimacy and rawness here that's rare even in O'Connor's outwardly autobiographical pieces […] These devotional writings are imprinted with the same humor, brilliance, and attention to life that one finds in her fiction. […] Because the circuitous map of her religious thinking isn't obvious in her stories, secular readers may feel free to ignore it. Nevertheless, as
A Prayer Journal suggests, O'Connor might never have come to write any of this fiction had she not been so fiercely direct about her desire to confront, in words, 'that supernatural grace that does whatever it does.' —René Steinke
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- Hardcover: 112 pages
- Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1ST edition (November 12, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0374236917
- ISBN-13: 978-0374236915
- Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 6.5 x 0.6 inches
- Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
What the prayer journal did for me was to drive me back to my Flannery library and start all over again. I now can read her with a new insight. In Brad Gooch's marvelous biography, I had learned how much her Catholic faith meant to her in that far off place in Iowa, where she was homesick and far from her Savannah roots, where she had, in the words of William Sessions, received from her southern and Catholic world, the view of a coherent universe. Gooch tells us that Flannery told a friend that she was able to go to Mass every single morning while at the Iowa Writers workshop. She went there to Mass for three years and never met a soul, she said, nor any of the priests, but it was not necessary. "As soon as I went in the door I was at home." What I didn't know was how willing she was to take a deep plunge into the depths of Catholicism. It is fitting that William Sessions was the one who brought this hidden journal to us. In the index of "The Habit of Being," the collected letters of Flannery O'Connor, Sessions turns up 28 times. He was a trusted friend and has turned out to be O'Connor's leading expert, among hundreds of scholarly admirers. I will bet you anything Flannery never thought her personal, private journal would see the light of day. I don't think she wore her religion on her sleeve and said one time she didn't even want to be known as a Catholic writer but hoped that she would just be known as a good writer, an honest writer and a real artist. I will bet you also that she would not like to be known as a mystic but she darned sure was. Like Dorothy Day (and they were very much aware of each other), she would have scoffed at the idea of being canonized a saint.
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