Raymond Chandler said that F. Scott Fitzgerald is “a subject no one has a right to mess up. Nothing but the best will do for him.” That is how I feel about Flannery O’Connor, the centennial of whose birth is this year. Chandler thought that Fitzgerald “just missed being a great writer.” I believe that O’Connor achieved what Fitzgerald missed, despite a life and a career tragically briefer even than Fitzgerald’s. In Chandler’s opinion, the author of The Great Gatsby and The Beautiful and Damned “had one of the rarest qualities in all literature. . . . The word is charm—charm as Keats would have used it.”
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