Title: Flannery O'Connor, hermit novelist / Richard Giannone
Description: ""Lord, I'm glad I'm a hermit novelist," Flannery O'Connor wrote to a friend in 1957. Sequestered by ill health, O'Connor spent the last thirteen years of her life on the family farm in rural Georgia, which she claimed was accessible "only by bus or buzzard." During this productive, solitary time she became increasingly fascinated by fourth-century Christians who retreated to the desert for spiritual replenishment.".

"In Flannery O'Connor, Hermit Novelist, Richard Giannone explores O'Connor's identification with these early Christian monastics, a bond that stemmed from her faith as well as her own isolation and physical suffering from lupus, and the ways in which their strange, still voices illuminate her fiction.

Distinguishing among various desert calls summoning O'Connor's protagonists to solitude and renunciation, Giannone shows how these characters live out a radical simplicity of ascetic discipline as a means of grappling with their demons and drawing closer to God."--BOOK JACKET.
Subjects: American Christian fiction, History and criticism, Catholics, Monastic and religious life in literature, Solitude in literature, Desert Fathers, Christianity and literature, Religion, Deserts in literature, Spiritual life in literature, Intellectual life, Asceticism in literature, Hermits in literature, History, O'connor, flannery, 1925-1964
Places: United States
People: Flannery O'Connor
Time periods: 20th century