Anne Faye

Flannery O’Conner was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925 and died at the age of thirty-nine after suffering from lupus for fourteen years. In between, she wrote two novels, thirty-one short stories, and numerous essays and reviews. Her work is widely held up as an example of what Catholic fiction should be. Never having read any of her fiction, I’ve nevertheless been intrigued by her, if only because I’ve heard her praised widely and often. Who was this remarkable woman and what does she have to say to a Catholic fiction writer today? Her recently published prayer journal (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013) can help answer both of those questions.  She kept this prayer journal from January 1946 – September 1947 when she was in her early twenties and attending the Iowa City writing workshops. At the same time, she began work on her first novel, Wise Blood . In the pages of this journal, we meet a very human young woman who struggles with the reality of life, but who is ...