Cash, Jean W. Flannery O’Connor: A Life. Tennessee, $30.

Christianity and Literature: “Cash has spoken with just about everyone who knew O’Connor and who is still around and willing to talk about here. Cash’s biography rests on this remarkable collection of interviews, which amplify the broad outlines of O’Connor’s life that were already known. The interviews also yield fascinating glimpses of a personality that was fierce and comic at ‘oncet’…Still, that determined and humorous individual never fully emerges in the details of Cash’s book.—J. Robert Baker, Fairmont State College.”

Publishers Weekly: “Cash's scrupulously detailed biography, the result of a decade of research, offers readers many particulars about O'Connor's (1925-1964) life, but ultimately falls short on insight into one of America's finest and most enigmatic writers.”

Library Journal: “O'Connor's daily life may have seemed prosaic, but as revealed by her writings and this fine new biography her interests, irony, and cold eye were hardly conventional. Cash (English, James Madison Univ.) spent ten years researching this work, and it shows; while this is not a critical study, it is the first book to chronicle O'Connor's life in such painstaking detail. Recommended for public and academic libraries. Robert L. Kelly, Fort Wayne Community Schs., IN.”

First Things: “A bitter disappointment. To begin with, it is distressingly ill-written: ponderous, trits, tediously repetitious, and burdened throughout by a kind of master’s thesis nervousness that shows itself in quotes that illuminate nothing and arguments for points that require no proof….In a few places Cash’s own pieties cloud her view of her subject so greatly as to result in distortion.—Paul Mankowski, Pontifical Biblical Institute, Rome.”

Southern Quarterly: “Cash tackles her subject with meticulous research and rhetorical sophistication…performs a valuable service for scholars and provides an accessible read for lay audiences…Cash works so hard to curtail speculation about O’Connor’s personal life that she loses the kind of narrative tension any good story needs…When Cash might offer far-reaching analysis, readers often get a list…gives readers plenty of important facts, but no growth, no struggle—no story.—Julie Buckner Armstrong, University of South Florida.”