It’s only a couple of hours down the highway to Milledgeville, where the year-round residents and the students at Georgia College & State University live cheek-to-jowl with ghosts and madness of the town’s past. A few blocks away from the attractive college campus and the Old State Capital and yet another quaint downtown are the three prisons backed up against each other and against what was once called, plainly and directly, the Milledgeville Lunatic Asylum. Back in the day, the mental hospital was second only to New York’s Bellevue in its inmate population, and the phrase “gone to Milledgeville” had only one meaning and everybody knew it. Weird Georgia says the hospital is haunted; people who work there say it’s very haunted.

On the way into Milledgeville from Athens - don’t blink or you’ll miss the sign - is Andalusia Farm. Now a fraction of its original size, it’s a beautiful expanse of green grass and canopy trees, a placid pond reflecting the soft verdant aura of the place in the afternoon. There’s the main house, the shack where the help used to live, a dairy barn, a horse barn, a pasture where one ancient horse with protruding ribs munches contentedly on clover. Andalusia was once a thriving dairy and beef farm, but now its sole function is to preserve the effects of its most famous resident, the writer Flannery O’Connor.

Though O’Connor was born in Savannah, Milledgeville’s juxtaposition of beauty and lunacy, Old South politics living down the road from barely contained violence - God’s country with deep, dark corners - suited her fiction. In two novels and two collections of short stories, O’Connor staked her claim on a territory where religion and fanaticism and bloodshed and the grotesque all converge in that way that only happens in the South. Her stories, and you know them - “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” “Parker’s Back,” many others - are required reading for any student of 20th-century American literature, and rightfully so. Though she personally detested the term, O’Connor was the master of what we call “Southern gothic,” comparable only to Faulkner among her contemporaries, and a powerful influence on all Southern fiction to follow.

Although O’Connor’s work has been fodder for many an academic paper, there has never been a solid biography of the author. Brad Gooch’s new book Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor (Little Brown, 2009) fills the void by exploring O’Connor’s own juxtapositions: her gentility and warmth with the freaks in her head, her optimism in the face of debilitating illness, and her unwavering faith amidst the new bohemianism of her circle and her time.

Drawing from the extensive collection of O’Connor’s papers and correspondence and upon interviews with friends, relatives and fellow writers, Gooch presents an in-depth and comprehensive look at Mary Flannery O’Connor’s life. The precocious daughter of a well-regarded, if not wealthy, Savannah family, O’Connor is shown even in childhood as an iconoclast, preferring the company of her pet duck to that of her peers, a bright girl with little regard for school, and a budding cartoonist with a sharp, often caustic wit. The family moved to Milledgeville to accommodate O’Connor’s beloved father, stricken by lupus and passed from doctor to doctor in Atlanta, to no avail. Attending Georgia State College for Women (as it was called then) during the World War II years, O’Connor began to realize a talent for writing and, in a bold move for a young Southern woman, applied to join the first class of the now-venerated Iowa Writers’ Workshop. At Iowa she wrote the first of the stories that would make her reputation, and began her first novel, Wise Blood. She received a residency at the prestigious Yaddo artists’ colony in upstate New York, breaking bread with Truman Capote, Malcolm Cowley and the poet Robert Lowell, who would have a special impact on her life.

O’Connor’s life outside Georgia was cut short by her own sudden and terrible onset of lupus, the autoimmune disease thought to skip generations, and as the ailment ravaged her joints, O’Connor found herself confined to crutches and to her mother’s care at Andalusia. In such confinement, however, O’Connor’s writing matured and she continued a remarkable career, not only as a writer but as a lecturer and student of theology, her deep Catholicism moved by the works of the medievalists. She developed a mutual admiration with Thomas Merton, author of The Seven-Story Mountain, and lectured widely on the place of the Catholic writer in the Protestant South.

First and foremost, however, were O’Connor’s stories, and they are at all times the touchstone of Gooch’s book. Despite much speculation about O’Connor’s sex life, particularly her brief relationship with a book salesman named Erik Langkjaer and a friendship in letters with lesbian journalist Betty Hester, Gooch refuses to indulge such inquiries, focusing instead on the events and influences that shaped each of O’Connor’s stories. O’Connor was a slow writer and meticulous in her craft, polishing and repolishing until her words shone, and so each piece of her work has its own evolutionary history which Gooch explores to fascinating effect. This is not to say that Gooch’s book is a dry piece of academe. On the contrary, his prose is lively and thoughtful, his biography a portrait rather than a dissection, and his approach is that of a fan first and a researcher second. Gooch’s enthusiasm for O’Connor’s work is evident and infectious - the moment I finished Flannery I went and dug out my copy of Wise Blood to reread - and it does suitable justice to the life, work, and character of one of our best.

John G. Nettles

Brad Gooch will read from his book, sign copies and hold a Q&A at Barnes & Noble in Athens on Sunday, Mar. 1 at 2 p.m.