Flannery O'Connor's Library - by Arthur F Kinney (Paperback)

About the Book

Noting all the passages O'Connor marked in her books, transcribing many of the passages, and showing all references to specific books in O'Connor's published letters and book reviews, Kinney gives readers the opportunity to hear the intellectual dialogue between O'Connor and authors as diverse as Carl Jung, Henry James, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Book Synopsis

More than just a bibliography, this catalog of Flannery O'Connor's library is an invitation to better understand the ideas, passions, and prejudices of the extraordinarily observant and creative author of Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away. Noting all the passages O'Connor marked in her books, transcribing many of the passages, and showing all references to specific books in O'Connor's published letters and book reviews, Arthur F. Kinney gives readers the opportunity to hear the intellectual dialogue between O'Connor and the authors of the books in her library--authors as diverse as Carl Jung, Henry James, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

A rich assembly of books on philosophy, theology, literature, literary criticism, and other subjects, O'Connor's personal library was collected while she lived at the family farmhouse near Milledgeville, Georgia. Now housed at Georgia College and State University, it shows signs of her frequent use. Passages that aroused such emotions as joy, wrath, and mockery are marked with her stars, checks, numbers, and often more extensive comments. Providing a general intellectual context for understanding O'Connor's work, the markings and notations offer in some cases a direct guide to specific facets of her work.

Helpful to anyone seeking to understand O'Connor, Flannery O'Connor's Library will prove indispensable to future study and criticism of one of the most complex and elusive twentieth-century American writers.

Review Quotes

Flannery O'Connor's Library is more than an inventory. . . . What [it] offers is the means by which scholars can consult O'Connor's library without having to make the pilgrimage to Milledgeville, and even for those who do it provides a ready means of locating important passages in O'Connor's reading. The result might be a better understanding of the intellectual and theological underpinnings of O'Connor's fiction and might even cause a decline in the number of blatant misreadings of her fiction.

--Modern Fiction Studies

A significant addition to O'Connor scholarship and one to which O'Connor scholars will frequently turn.

--Mississippi Quarterly

A valuable resource for O'Connor scholars, and highly recommended.

--Library Journal

Kinney has produced an exemplary study of Flannery O'Connor's library. One discovers at every turn precious bits of information which can only expand one's understanding of the Georgia writer's art. . . . It is difficult to imagine anyone improving on what Arthur F. Kinney has done here.

--International Fiction Review

About the Author

ARTHUR F. KINNEY, a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, is the author of Faulkner's Narrative Poetics and coeditor of Bear, Man and God.