The Habit of Being by Flannery O'Connor

Author:Flannery O'Connor
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

To John Hawkes

27 July 58

I haven’t written and thanked you for the books because I have been reading them. I braved the Faulkner, without tragic results. Probably the real reason I don’t read him is because he makes me feel that with my one-cylinder syntax I should quit writing and raise chickens altogether.

I am very much taken with your books and their wonderful imaginative energy. The more fantastic the action the more precise the writing and this is the way it ought to be. I have a friend, James Dickey, a poet, who was down here recently to show his little boy the ponies. I told him I was reading your books and it turned out that he has read all of them, including ones called The Owl and The Goose on the Grave. He described a passage in one of them where a man flies—he was lost in admiration. It appears he reads your books as they come out. You may state without fear of contradiction that you now have two fans in Georgia.

Your student’s story is amusing and shows a wonderful imagination at work. However, I think she makes a mistake to set it in Georgia. That seems to me to detract from the fantasy. A fantasy attached to Georgia ought to have something of Georgia about it, and of course this doesn’t.

I am more than pleased that you stopped to see me and that I’ve been introduced to your writing. Remember me to your wife and please stop again when you are down this way.

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