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About A Prayer Journal
Product 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. From Booklist Those familiar with O’Connor’s oeuvre know that her strong Roman Catholic faith informs all her work. This is one reason that her recently discovered prayer journal, penned while she attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1947 and 1948, is such a significant find. Although extremely brief, this series of heartfelt prayers and musings offered up by one of the most gifted writers of her generation provides a uniquely intimate glimpse into the heart, soul, and mind of a deeply religious genius. Guaranteed to excite American-literature buffs and O’Connor scholars, this slim volume also includes photocopies of the original handwritten texts. --Margaret Flanagan From Bookforum There's an intimacy and rawness here that's rare even in O'Connor's outwardly autobiographical pieces […] These devotional writings are imprinted with the same humor, brilliance, and attention to life that one finds in her fiction. […] Because the circuitous map of her religious thinking isn't obvious in her stories, secular readers may feel free to ignore it. Nevertheless, as A Prayer Journal suggests, O'Connor might never have come to write any of this fiction had she not been so fiercely direct about her desire to confront, in words, 'that supernatural grace that does whatever it does.' —René Steinke Review "When I read Flannery O'Connor, I do not think of Hemingway, or Katherine Anne Porter, or Sartre, but rather of someone like Sophocles. What more can you say for a writer?" --Thomas Merton "This slender, charming book must be approached with a special tact. To read it feels a little like an intrusion on inwardness itself . . . The brilliance that would make [O'Connor's] fictions literary classics is fully apparent . . . ["A Prayer Journal"] is as eloquent on the subject of creativity as it is on the subject of prayer . . . The prose is absolutely brilliant, sentence by sentence, simile by simile . . . relentlessly inventive . . . [O'Connor's] religious sincerity is beyond question, but the forms of its expression raise many questions. This is no criticism. It is the honorable work of any writer who touches on great matters to provoke . . . This little journal puts its reader a step closer to one touching and remarkable young mind." --Marilynne Robinson, "The New York Tim
