Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O’Connor: Links, Likeness, Legacy

This talk by scholar-in-residence, Dr. Farrell O'Gorman, will detail how Cormac McCarthy (1933-2023), one of the most acclaimed American novelists of the last 50 years, is inextricably linked to Flannery O’Connor. He repeatedly praised her in the early years of his career–most substantially in his correspondence with Robert Coles, an influential Harvard child psychiatrist who wrote extensively on O’Connor while also acting as a patron to McCarthy. In his fiction, McCarthy, like O’Connor, continually addressed certain recurrent philosophical and religious questions (e.g., regarding gnosticism) that are essential to understanding the two of them as not only Southern Gothic but American Gothic authors. Finally, their legacies have frequently overlapped in critically acclaimed films from the 1970s to the present, perhaps most complexly in the Oscar-winning Coen brothers film "No Country for Old Men" (2007).

Farrell O’Gorman is Professor of English at Belmont Abbey College and taught previously at Mississippi State University and DePaul University. He is the author of two monographs: "Peculiar Crossroads: Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy and Catholic Vision in Postwar Southern Fiction" (2004) and "Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination" (2017). He has spoken on O’Connor at a variety of regional and national events, conferences in France and Italy and the 2014 O’Connor conference in Ireland, for which he served on the organizing committee. O'Gorman is a scholar-in-residence at Georgia College & State University for fall 2024.