Flannery O’Connor: Mates Do not Let Mates Learn Ayn Rand

In a let­ter dat­ed Could 31, 1960, Flan­nery O’Con­nor, the writer greatest identified for her clas­sic sto­ry, “A Good Man is Laborious to Discover” (lis­ten to her learn the sto­ry right here) penned a let­ter to her buddy, the play­wright Mary­at Lee. It begins fairly abrupt­ly, like­ly as a result of it’s reply­ing to some­factor Mary­at stated in a pre­vi­ous let­ter:

I hope you don’t have mates who rec­om­mend Ayn Rand to you. The fic­tion of Ayn Rand is as little as you may get re fic­tion. I hope you picked it up off the ground of the sub­method and threw it within the close to­est rubbish pail. She makes Mick­ey Spillane appear to be Dos­to­evsky.

The let­ter, which you’ll be able to learn on-line or discover within the guide The Behavior of Being, then turns to oth­er mat­ters.

O’Con­nor’s crit­i­cal appraisal of Ayn Rand’s books is pret­ty straight­for­ward. However right here’s one fac­toid price know­ing. Mick­ey Spillane (ref­er­enced in O’Con­nor’s let­ter) was an enormous­ly pop­u­lar mys­tery author, who bought some 225 mil­lion books dur­ing his life­time. Accord­ing to his Wash­ing­ton Publish obit, “his spe­cial­ty was tight-fist­ed, sadis­tic revenge sto­ries, typically fea­tur­ing his alco­holic gumshoe Mike Ham­mer and a solid of evil­do­ers.” Crit­ics, appalled by the intercourse and vio­lence in his books, dis­missed his writ­ing. However Ayn Rand defend­ed him. In pub­lic, she stated that Spillane was underneath­rat­ed. In her guide The Roman­tic Man­i­festo, Rand put Spillane in some unex­pect­ed com­pa­ny when she wrote: “[Vic­tor] Hugo provides me the texture­ing of enter­ing a cathedral–Dostoevsky provides me the texture­ing of enter­ing a cham­ber of hor­rors, however with a pow­er­ful information–Spillane provides me the texture­ing of lis­ten­ing to a mil­i­tary band in a pub­lic park–Tolstoy provides me the texture­ing of an unsan­i­tary again­yard which I don’t care to enter.”

All of this goes to indicate that _____. We’ll allow you to fill within the clean.

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