Overview
Andalusian Hours: Poems from the Porch of Flannery O’Connor is a series of 101 sonnets that channel the thoughts and voice of O’Connor as she ponders the meaning of her life at Andalusia, the farm owned by her family in rural Georgia. The sonnets also tell the poignant story, in brief poetic snapshots, of her life. Flannery was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1925, but moved with her parents, Edward and Regina O’Connor, to the town of Milledgeville when she was 13. Three years later her father died of Lupus, leaving his wife and only child bereft. Flannery attended high school and college in Milledgeville, finally leaving at age 20 to attend the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. After earning her M.F.A. she enjoyed a writer’s residency at the famed writer’s colony, Yaddo, in upstate New York, where she met influential literary friends (including poet Robert Lowell), and lived for a time in New York City and in neighboring Connecticut working on her first novel, Wise Blood. In 1950 at age 25, as Flannery was poised at the start of a promising writing career, disaster struck: she was diagnosed with Lupus—a disease she referred to as “the Red Wolf”— and was forced to return home to Milledgeville. She would live there in the care of her mother at Andalusia for the rest of her life. Thirteen years later, on August 3, 1964, Flannery O’Connor died of the same disease that killed her father. She was only 39. While living there, she wrote two novels, dozens of stories, many essays and reviews, and hundreds of letters to friends and strangers alike. It is on these writings that her reputation rests. O’Connor wrote fiction and non-fiction prose that challenges received notions of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Her stories and novels are unmistakably her own, life seen through her own shrewd eye, heard with her flawless ear, and narrated in her own unmistakable voice. The poems in this collection explore those vantage points, enabling readers to see the world as Flannery saw it—broken and yet charged with the presence of a God who manifests himself in beautiful, strange, and unexpected ways.
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