Creating Flannery O'Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers by Daniel Moran (review)

In Creating Flannery O'Connor, Daniel Moran early offers the nuance of his book's subject: not O'Connor's literary reputation—why she matters—but the creation of her reputation, or how she mattered and to whom (p. 9). Admittedly, the scope of this investigation is ambitious, for Moran does not confine himself to O'Connor's oeuvre in its inspiration and creation; rather, he endeavors to seat O'Connor's cultural and literary legacy within a complex matrix of how the "author's work, personality, and even image are marketed, packaged, presented, adapted, and received" (p. 2).

O'Connor's reputation, he reminds, can be understood not simply as a phenomenon resulting from her talent alone but also "as the result of a network of events, chance occurrences, personal relationships, media adaptations, cultural institutions, and websites" (p. 8). Moran is most deft at articulating this matrix as a trajectory. Throughout the work, he assembles "the history of [O'Connor's] critical reception and literary identity" (p. 3) in such a way that we might cast our gaze forward and backward at once. We muse with Moran over the diverse factors that created (and continue to create) O'Connor's literary legacy, while observing how that legacy shapes our assumptions as we read O'Connor's past artistic accomplishments in the present.

Through a dexterous mining of vast and diverse sources, Moran demonstrates his caveat-cum-thesis that O'Connor's place in the American literary pantheon was not a fait accompli. He begins by pairing her fiction with its critical reception. Here Wise Blood stands as prime exemplar, as its first two releases—ten years apart—allow open space wherein Moran tussles with sources ranging from critical reviews to cover designs. Later chapters expand this open space further still, illuminating the growth of "the increasingly widening lens through which O'Connor's fiction was being viewed" (p. 100). Along the way, Moran details the subtle ironies of her literary ascendency, noting with some satisfaction when critics posthumously praise O'Connor for the very things they castigated her for during her lifetime.

Moran commands an extraordinary volume of critical reviews, spanning a remarkable historical scope. What impresses the reader even more is his selection of sources beyond the literary critical establishment. To tell his creation narrative, he includes, alongside the published criticism, interviews and letters to the editor, press releases and publication notices, personal correspondence and perm requests, thank-you notes and fan mail, award speeches and civic proclamations, actor interviews and film trailers. The work on Robert Giroux's editorial advocacy in chapter 4 is an especially valuable contribution, allowing the reader to see how the marketing, perming, reprinting, anthologizing, and even posthumous publication of O'Connor was a consciously curated literary legacy. Further, his exploration of the radical democratization of criticism in online forums and "social reading sites" (p. 164) breaks new ground in O'Connor studies.

Though the content of O'Connor's Catholic faith is not probed in great detail (readers eager for this treatment can find excellent works by Ralph C. Wood, Susan Srigley, Paul Elie, and Farrell O'Gorman, among others), Moran devotes the entirety of chapter 2 to detailing how her audience (readers as well as critics) became capable of understanding its significance. Moran thus weighs in on the critical divide over the relationship between O'Connor's (more explicitly theological) nonfiction writings to her fiction in a new way through his portrait of O'Connor as an incontrovertibly "Catholic writer," whether or not her faith may be taken as the interpretive key to the meaning of her work.

Throughout this handsome monograph Moran charts a course, giving us "signposts" (p. 49) to mark not only the evolving understanding of O'Connor's genius but also the active "building of her literary reputation" (p. 43). Happily, he also minds the places...