A must for aspiring writers: an indispensable collection of a great writer’s reflections on her craft.
For the first time in one volume, the distilled wisdom of an American literary genius through her letters, reviews, interviews and essays.
Flannery O’Connor’s reflections about the art and aim of fiction writing, long scattered amongst her letters, book reviews, interviews, and talks, are gathered here for the first time.“I want to be the best artist it is possible for me to be, under God.” O’Connor wrote those words in 1947, while a student at the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. Over the next seventeen years, while she published two novels and two short story collections and made a name for herself as the most astonishing writer of her generation, O’Connor never stopped considering herself to be a student of her craft, apprenticing herself to the novelist and short story writer Caroline Gordon, sharing drafts of her work with friends, and critiquing the work of her friends in turn.
How does a writer make or find the meaning in a story? How does belief inform writing? And what about technique? Here are twenty-one witty and wise letters, many of them hard to find, interviews, and book reviews in which O’Connor worked out her theories of the art and nature of fiction writing, culminating in two talks in which O’Connor summarized, at the height of her career, her hard-won artistic insight. The writings gathered here offer a window into O’Connor’s life and work, showing the evolution of an artist; they will also help and inspire students of writing today.
