GOOD THINGS OUT OF NAZARETH

A literary treasure from National Book Award winning author Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) and her circle of extraordinary friends. This compilation of over 100 unpublished letters from the vault of the Flannery O'Connor estate offers insight into faith, religion, sex, culture, and the literary world of mid-20th century America. A story of friendship told in letters, this book features never before seen letters from such contemporaries as Walker Percy and Caroline Gordon.

Flannery O'Connor is a star of 20th century American literature. Those familiar with her writings know that her strong faith and struggle with Protestantism and Catholicism in the deep South informed all that she wrote and did. This book is a collection of many of her unpublished letters along with those of such literary stars as Walker Percy (author of The Moviegoer), Robert Giroux, Caroline Gordon, and movie critic Stanley Kauffmann. Themes of creativity, faith, work, and writing emerge, forming a riveting literary portrait of these friends, artists, and thinkers. Here we find their joys and loves as well as their trials and tribulations as they struggle with doubt and illness while championing their Christian beliefs and fighting racism in the world of Jim Crow.

Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925. A devoted Catholic, she lived most of her life on a farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she raised peacocks and wrote. She was the author of two novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away; thirty-one short stories; and numerous essays and reviews. She died at the age of thirty-nine. Her complete short stories, published posthumously in 1971, received the National Book Award for fiction.