Flannery O'Connor and Me

"I work from such a basis of poverty that everything I do is miracle to me. However, don't think I write for purgation. I write because I write well.

"It may be that a writer can sentimentalize certain segments of the population and get away with it, but they cannot sentimentalize the poor and get away with it...I have never read J.T. Farell or Steinbeck or any of the people who deal with the afflicted (economically afflicted, that is)... It may be that no American can write about the poor the way Europe can.

"It may also be that poverty in this country is not a matter of physical want anyway, except in certain particular areas. In any case, when you write about the poor, you have to be writing about yourself first, everybody else second, and the actual poor third. The particular appeal of the poor for the fiction writer is existential not economic, but a great deal of the writing about them since and during the 30s seems to consist in numbering their lice."


Flannery O'Connor
THE HABIT OF BEING

FB note, December 27, 2010 at 8:14pm