A Prayer Journal
Stock No: WW236915
A Prayer Journal  -     By: Flannery O'Connor

A Prayer Journal

MacMillan / 2013 / Hardcover

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Stock No: WW236915

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Product Description

This recently discovered prayer journal, written from 1946 to 1947 when O'Connor was a student at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, is an extraordinary portal into the interior life of a great writer. Not only does it reveal a deep yearning for God and for literary achievement, but it lays bare her intense imagination. 96 pages, hardcover. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Product Information

Title: A Prayer Journal
By: Flannery O'Connor
Format: Hardcover
Number of Pages: 96
Vendor: MacMillan
Publication Date: 2013
Dimensions: 8.30 X 6.20 (inches)
Weight: 11 ounces
ISBN: 0374236917
ISBN-13: 9780374236915
Stock No: WW236915

Publisher's Description

"I would like to write a beautiful prayer," writes the young Flannery O'Connor in this deeply spiritual journal, recently discovered among her papers in Georgia. "There is a whole sensible world around me that I should be able to turn to Your praise." Written between 1946 and 1947 while O'Connor was a student far from home at the University of Iowa, A Prayer Journal is a rare portal into the interior life of the great writer. Not only does it map O'Connor's singular relationship with the divine, but it shows how entwined her literary desire was with her yearning for God. "I must write down that I am to be an artist. Not in the sense of aesthetic frippery but in the sense of aesthetic craftsmanship; otherwise I will feel my loneliness continually . . . I do not want to be lonely all my life but people only make us lonelier by reminding us of God. Dear God please help me to be an artist, please let it lead to You."

O'Connor could not be more plain about her literary ambition: "Please help me dear God to be a good writer and to get something else accepted," she writes. Yet she struggles with any trace of self-regard: "Don't let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story."

As W. A. Sessions, who knew O'Connor, writes in his introduction, it was no coincidence that she began writing the stories that would become her first novel, Wise Blood, during the years when she wrote these singularly imaginative Christian meditations. Including a facsimile of the entire journal in O'Connor's own hand, A Prayer Journal is the record of a brilliant young woman's coming-of-age, a cry from the heart for love, grace, and art.

Author Bio

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; thrity-one short stories; and numerous essays and reviews. When she died at the age of thirty-nine, America lost one of its most gifted writers at the height of her powers. Her complete short stories, published posthumously in 1971, received the National Book Award for fiction.

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