Since she was so marvelously prolific, Flannery O’Connor’s artistic legacy–two novels and some of the finest short stories of the 20th century—will forever inspire conjecture about what she might have written if lupus had not taken her life at the age of thirty-nine. Alas, unless a lost novel suddenly appears, the best consolation available to her admirers might be the recent discovery of a private journal that she wrote between January 1947 and September 1947, when still in her early twenties. The collection provides an illuminating portal into O’Connor’s youthful but serious mind, and presages her more mature thinking on the mission of the Catholic novelist in what she considered an “unbelieving age.”
W.A. Sessions, the editor of the journal and a friend of O’Connor’s, aptly titled the book A Prayer Journal, since it is essentially an epistolary collection with most entries quite literally addressed to God. Written informally and even intimately, but also deferentially, it seems as if O’Connor was grasping for the proper tone to correspond with her Lord:
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