O'Connor Flannery. The Habit of Being

Holtzbrink, 1988. — 640 p. — ISBN: 0374521042.
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Special Award
"I have come to think that the true likeness of Flannery O'Connor will be painted by herself, a self-portrait in words, to be found in her letters... There she stands, a phoenix risen from her own words: calm, slow, funny, courteous, both modest and very sure of herself, intense, sharply penetrating, devout but never pietistic, downright, occasionally fierce, and honest in a way that restores honor to the word."—Sally Fitzgerald.
Flannery O'Connor wrote the last sentence of her last letter on August 3, 1964, six days before the systemic lupus she'd been fighting since her diagnosis in 1951 attacked her immune system and took her life. This makes me wonder what the last sentence I'll ever write is going to be. The prevalence of social media does not bode well for cosmic insight.
O'Connor had returned to Midgeville, Georgia to be cared for by her mother and lived fourteen years after her diagnosis, publishing two novels (Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away) and a multitude of short stories, some published posthumously in 1965 in All That Rises Must Converge. A definitive collection, The Complete Stories, was published in 1971.
While O'Connor never wrote a memoir or a book on writing, we do have her letters, selected and edited by Sally Fitzgerald and published in 1979 as The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor. The author reserves much space to discuss her Catholic faith, its role in her work and in critical misreadings of it, as well as describing events such as writing panels, college lectures or fan mail with deadpan wit. O'Connor was much more comfortable around her peafowl or chickens.