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Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee

c/o Stamp Development

U.S. Postal Service

1735 North Lynn Street, Suite 5013

Arlington, VA 22209-6432

Dear Stamp Advisory Committee Members:

Please accept this letter as my earnest, enthusiastic support for the issuance of a commemorative stamp honoring the life and works of Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) in the Literary Arts Series.  As a preeminent master of the short story, on par with the best fiction writers our national tradition can boast and one with global recognition, O’Connor deserves this honor.  Her works reveal a keen eye for the nuances of human behavior, and like William Faulkner, she turned her Southern “postage stamp” locality into a microcosm for illuminating our foibles, our complexities, and our overarching need for grace.  She recognized the inherent violence in our human predicament and grappled with it in powerful, yet often comic ways.  Like the postmodernists, her works reflect a sense of play (especially in the number of ways we can find to err); like the modernists, her work reflects a disdain for conformity and consumerism; like the romantics, she saw us as creatures exercising free will with abandon; and like the neo-classicists, she saw rules informing reality that we could ignore only at our peril—both now and hereafter.

O’Connor stands alone among American writers as having created an intense and sustained impact on readers and scholars and thinkers with so modest a number of works (two novels and two collections of short stories).  Her 1979 posthumously published collection of letters, The Habit of Being, afforded us an autobiography of sorts, and the life it revealed was shown to be so deeply and compellingly lived that the publication won the National Book Critics Circle Special Award for that year.  She has come to be anthologized in nearly every secondary and college literature text in our country.  With her own international society (420 members strong), an annual scholarly journal devoted to the study of her work, the academic articles on her ranking among the top twenty of all American writers, a recent feature story on her in the New York Times, and both her childhood and adult homes being run successfully as literary landmarks that attract thousands of visitors each year, surely her time has come to be honored among those Americans who have shaped and expressed what we most are.

The impact of Flannery O’Connor’s works on the American imagination has proven to be timeless and enduring.  It is my hope that you will honor that achievement by adding her name and image to the roster of American writers whose life and works have already been recognized in the Literary Arts Series.

Sincerely,