Yet 45 years after her death at 39 from lupus, O'Connor resists biographical treatment, because other than her writing, not much happened in her life. (The other is Jean Cash's 'Flannery O'Connor: A Life.') It's not that plenty hasn't been written about her she has, Gooch tells us, 'become a one-woman academic industry,' subject of countless dissertations and critical studies, as well as one very good group biography, Paul Elie's 'The Life You Save May Be Your Own,' which discusses her through the filter of her Catholicism, along with Thomas Merton, Walker Percy and Dorothy Day.

'Flannery' is just the second full biography of O'Connor. For all of four seconds, O'Connor, a self-possessed little girl, is glimpsed in glaring afternoon light, a wisp of curls peeking from beneath her cap, calmly coping with three chickens fluttering in her face.' Here we have a stunning metaphor for not only her writing but also her existence: brief, glancing, almost impossible to pin down. 'O'Connor's screen debut,' Gooch writes, 'exists in all its fragility in a Pathe film archive. Such an image highlights O'Connor's lifelong fascination with birds, but most telling is that even at this age, she was elusive, standing just outside our grasp. Brad Gooch opens 'Flannery,' his biography of Flannery O'Connor, with a lost moment: an account of how when O'Connor was 5, the Pathe newsreel company sent a cameraman to her home in Savannah, Ga., to film a chicken she had trained to walk backward.

Flannery by Brad Gooch