. . . is a term of power and sorrow, anger, dissolution, humor, and victory. Among other things, it is the title of Richard Wright’s novel about a man driven to violence by his realization that the world values power and that the single individual is “nothing.” This little essay is the first of an occasional series on the concept of the outsider.
As readers of her fiction and letters will know, Flannery O’Connor won the Rinehart-Iowa Fiction Award in 1947. She had been a student of the School of Writers at the University of Iowa, and her short stories, a few of which would become chapters in her novel, Wise Blood, were submitted by her teacher in the School, Paul Engle. The award included an advance of $750 against royalties if the publisher, Rinehart, in New York, accepted the finished novel.
Flannery came from the tiny town of Milledgeville, Georgia, but had made friends at Iowa and later at and through the writing colony of Yaddo in Saratoga Springs. Robert Penn Warren, Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, Alfred Kazin, Philip Rahv, Engle; she was appreciated by writers and critics of the highest level, and this, before she was much published.
Things did not go well with Rinehart from the beginning:
January, 20, 1949, to her agent:
“Here are the first nine chapters of the novel, which please show John Selby [the editor at Rinehart] and let us be on with financial thoughts.”
February 17, 1949, the same:
“I received Selby’s letter today. . . . I presume [he] says either that Rinehart will not take the novel as it will be if left to my fiendish care (it will be essentially as it is), or that Rinehart would like to rescue it at this point and train it into a conventional novel.”
There is more, and writers of all stripes are urged to read about these first months of Flannery’s dealings with the publishing world, but this last line touches on what I mean by outsider. With the help of her agent, she is able to disentangle herself from Rinehart, move to Harcourt, from whom Wise Blood appears in 1952, and finally follow Robert Giroux to Farrar, her publisher until her death from lupus in 1964, at age 39.
There were undoubtedly miscommunications on both sides — when Flannery pulls away from Rinehart finally, she describes it to her old friend Engle thus:
“Selby and I came to the conclusion that I was ‘prematurely arrogant.’ I supplied him with the phrase.”
This also is important, the more so because the phrase was hers. Flannery learns she has lupus in 1950 and soon decides that she cannot live north any longer and returns to Milledgeville to live with her mother.
During her life, she published two novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, and a collection of stories, A Good Man is Hard to Find. After her death, a second collection of stories appeared, Everything That Rises Must Converge, a selected letters, The Habit of Being, and a miscellany of occasional prose, Mystery and Manners.
Finally, from a brave series of letters in her last weeks:
June 17, 1964, about her posthumous collection:
“I wrote Giroux and asked him to hold off the publication date of the stories until spring. In that way I thought I could probably manage another story.”
July 15:
“I have drug another out of myself and I enclose it. . . . I’m still in bed but I climb out of it into the typewriter about 2 hours every morning.”
July 21:
“I’m still puttering on my story that I thought I’d finished but not long at a time. I go across the room & I’m exhausted.”
July 28, her last letter before her death on August 3:
“Don’t know when I’ll send those stories. I’ve felt too bad to type them.”