Flannery O'Connor and Robert Giroux: A Publishing Partnership
Flannery O'Connor is considered one of America's greatest fiction writers. The immensely talented Robert Giroux, editor-in-chief of Harcourt, Brace & Company and later of Farrar, Straus; Giroux, was her devoted friend and admirer. He edited her three books published during her lifetime, plus Everything that Rises Must Converge, which she completed just before she died in 1964 at the age of thirty-nine, the posthumous The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor, and the subsequent award-winning collection of her letters titled The Habit of Being. When poet Robert Lowell first introduced O'Connor to Giroux in March 1949, she could not have imagined the impact that meeting would have on her life or on the landscape of postwar American literature.
Flannery O'Connor and Robert Giroux: A Publishing Partnership sheds new light on an area of Flannery O'Connor's life--her relationship with her editors--that has not been well documented or narrated by critics and biographers. Impressively researched and rich in biographical details, this book chronicles Giroux's and O'Connor's personal and professional relationship, not omitting their circle of friends and fellow writers, including Robert Lowell, Caroline Gordon, Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, Allen Tate, Thomas Merton, and Robert Penn Warren. As Patrick Samway explains, Giroux guided O'Connor to become an internationally acclaimed writer of fiction and nonfiction, especially during the years when she suffered from lupus at her home in Milledgeville, Georgia, a disease that eventually proved fatal. Excerpts from their correspondence, some of which are published here for the first time, reveal how much of Giroux's work as editor was accomplished through his letters to Milledgeville. They are gracious, discerning, and appreciative, just when they needed to be. In Father Samway's portrait of O'Connor as an extraordinarily dedicated writer and businesswoman, she emerges as savvy, pragmatic, focused, and determined. This engrossing account of O'Connor's publishing history will interest, in addition to O'Connor's fans, all readers and students of American literature.
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Patrick Samway, S.J., professor emeritus of English at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia, is the author or editor/co-editor of thirteen books, including The Letters of Robert Giroux and Thomas Merton (University of Notre Dame Press, 2015) and Walker Percy: A Life, selected by the New York Times Book Review as one of the notable books of 1997.
"Samway's book benefits from a careful analysis of copious correspondence, interviews, and O'Connor's writing itself to tell us the story of how two remarkable lives were woven together and how they both were made stronger for it."--Publishing Research Quarterly
"Patrick Samway, S.J., locates Flannery O'Connor in a new country--not in the South of her red clay roads and not in the realm of the Christian sacred but in the literary marketplace of writers, editors, and publishers. His work shows how O'Connor did not leave publication matters to accident or to the angels; rather, she collaborated happily with editor Robert Giroux to bring her writing into print. The book vividly and meticulously chronicles as never before the sheer busyness with which O'Connor pursued the business of publication."--Gary Ciuba, author of Desire, Violence, and Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction: Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Walker Percy
"'It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature, ' Henry James remarked in his short book on Hawthorne. Among the merits of Patrick Samway's new book is how very much history Samway brings to bear on the relationship between Flannery O'Connor and her editor and friend Robert Giroux. In his presentation, the story of their efforts together across fifteen years carries with it countless particulars from the literary history of their age--a history in which Robert Giroux can be seen more clearly than ever as a central figure."--Paul Elie, author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage
"This is a masterful account of the literary and personal relationship between O'Connor the brilliant writer and Giroux the editor par excellence. Using a wide range of sources, Patrick Samway, S.J., situates both O'Connor and Giroux within a broad context of biographical, historical, cultural, and literary influences and traces their mutual development and growing friendship as it developed into an intimate editor/author partnership. Samway's own skills as an editor--his impressive command of details, his judicious insights and judgments, his sensitivity to the challenges both figures faced in their careers--helps create a nuanced narrative of two of the brightest literary presences of the twentieth century."--John F. Desmond, author of Risen Sons: Flannery O'Connor's Vision of History
"Patrick Samway's new book consists of three subjects: the long and deepening relationship between Flannery O'Connor and her editor, Robert Giroux; some reflections on the theological implications of O'Connor's fiction; and finally, an overview of the Catholic artists and intellectuals who composed a circle around her. It is, considering the literary estates that granted permissions, an impressively authorized book, and it participates in a long line of criticism that claims O'Connor as a primarily Catholic writer."--Flannery O'Connor Review
"Fr. Samway's book is a fascinating study of their professional and working relationship that goes beyond the immediate subject to include O'Connor's friendships with many other writers of the period."--Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture
"When everything was coming together for the young, Southern, Catholic fiction writer Flannery O'Connor, it all began to fall apart. That's the critical insight readers will glean from Jesuit priest Patrick Samway's thoughtful, smartly written literary study Flannery O'Connor and Robert Giroux: A Publishing Partnership."--Today's American Catholic
"You don't have to have read deeply in O'Connor's oeuvre to enjoy Samway's part-biography, part-memoir, part-literary analysis. It is full of interesting tidbits."--National Catholic Reporter
"Samway is fastidious in this glimpse into the working relationship between author Flannery O'Connor and editor Robert Giroux... The respective biographies are seamlessly welded together... Samway weaves an insightful account of how an uncommonly discerning editor helped guide a distinctive authorial voice to new literary heights."--Publishers Weekly
"While Samway's book will introduce many readers to Giroux, it also introduces them to a new side of Flannery-- not Flannery the literary genius, incisive essayist, or witty letter-writer, but Flannery the harried author. We're drawn into her navigation of a world of travel, contracts, typos, blurbs, reviews, translations-- and her human side is thrown into relief."-- Word on Fire
"Flannery O'Connor and Robert Giroux is a tale of love and friendship .. . an important work of consummate scholarship [and] a fascinating narrative of American Catholic literary history."--American Catholic Studies
". . . a nuanced account of two important figures in the world of American publishing that considers history, culture, and religion."--Xavier Review
