Flanneriana

Rosemary M. Magee. Conversations with Flannery O'Connor. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1987. xxvii + 118 pp. Edward Kessler. Flannery O'Connor and the Language of Apocalypse. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986.163 pp. At a time when the latest orthodoxy in academic literary circles is the vexed topic of "the canon," no recent American writer appears more surely canonical than Flannery O'Connor. Inclusion in the Library of America is probably as close to the rite of canonization as one gets these days, and she is the only writer of her generation so elevated, the youngest to have a volume next to such fixed stars as Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, James and Faulkner. Skeptics might insinuate that she has simply been dead long enough to be "safe," but surcease has not helped such others as her fellow Georgian Carson McCullers, whose luster seems to have faded considerably since her death. It seems a very long time now since I, as a graduate student, sat in the dimmed office of the chairman of my department not long after O'Connor's death and broached the subject of a thesis on her fiction. Did I really think she was worthy of such an honor, he solemnly asked me, and I quite as solemnly affirmed my belief that she was. Now one picks up the newspaper to find Alfred Kazin calling her "one of the few American novelists of my time I am sure will be read well into the next century." He is far from alone

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