aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Sunday, May 13, 2007

Flannery’s friend

Big news in my neck of the woods:

By outward appearances, Betty Hester was an unremarkable woman. She never married or had children, living instead with an aunt in a Midtown apartment. She rarely went out for fun. She took the bus each day to work as a file clerk for a credit bureau in downtown Atlanta.

Few people knew that Hester - an avid and insightful reader - was a close friend and confidante of the world-renowned Georgia author Flannery O’Connor, although the two rarely met in person. Over the course of nine years, though, from 1955 until O’Connor’s death in 1964, they wrote to each other nearly every week, discussing everything from Catholicism to current events in wide-ranging letters that were “the most personal” of O’Connor’s correspondence, according to Bill Sessions, Hester’s literary executor.

In an event highly anticipated by O’Connor scholars and fans, her nearly 300 letters to Hester will be opened to the public Saturday at Emory University, where, at Hester’s request, they have been kept under seal for 20 years.

Andrew Sullivan sees “O’Connor’s humane and ready wit” in this excerpt:

“You don’t look anything like I expected you to as I always take people at their word and I was prepared for white hair, horn-rimmed spectacles, nose of eagle and shape of ginger-beer bottle. Seek the truth and pursue it: you ain’t even passably ugly.”

NPR’s All Things Considered talks with Steve Enniss of Emory University about the letters. The AJC notes that in the first five hours “only five people had signed in and perused the collection.”