The Works of Doris Lessing and Flannery O’Connor

Resources at the SJRCC Libraries Selected by Robbie Allen

PAL = Palatka Campus | OPC = Orange Park Campus | SAC = St. Augustine Campus

In this fascinating and beguiling novel, Lessing confronts the themes that inspired much of her early writing: how men and women manage to live side by side in the world and how the troublesome particulars of gender affect every aspect of our existence."

Call number: PAL - PR6023.E833 C57 2007b

Time Bites: Views and Reviews - Publisher's Marketing: "In this collection of the very best of Doris Lessing's essays, we are treated to the wisdom and keen insight of a writer who has learned, over the course of a brilliant career spanning more than half a century, to read the world differently. From imagining the secret sex life of Tolstoy to the secrets of Sufism, from reviews of classic books to commentaries on world politics, these essays cover an impressive range of subjects, cultures, periods, and themes, yet they are remarkably consistent in one key regard: Lessing's clear-eyed vision and clearly expressed prose."

Call number: PAL - PR6023.E833 T56 2006

Martha Quest - Publisher's Marketing: "Intelligent, sensitive, and fiercely passionate, Martha Quest is a young woman living on a farm in Africa, feeling her way through the torments of adolescence and early womanhood. She is a romantic idealistic in revolt against the puritan snobbery of her parents, trying to live to the full with every nerve, emotion, and instinct laid bare to experience. For her, this is a time of solitary reading daydreams, dancing -- and the first disturbing encounters with sex. The first of Doris Lessing's timeless Children of Violence novels, Martha Quest is an endearing masterpiece."

Call number: PAL - PR6023.E833 M38 2001

The experiences absorbed through these "skins too few" are evoked in this memoir of Doris Lessing's childhood and youth as the daughter of a British colonial family in Persia and Southern Rhodesia Honestly and with overwhelming immediacy, Lessing maps the growth of her consciousness, her sexuality, and her politics, offering a rare opportunity to get under her skin and discover the forces that made her one of the most distinguished writers of our time."

Call number: PAL - PR6023.E833 Z477 1995

Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography--1949-1962 - Publisher's Marketing: "Walking in the Shade covers the years 1949 to 1962, from Lessing's arrival in London with her son, Peter, and the manuscript of her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, under her arm to the publication of her most famous work of fiction, The Golden Notebook. This was the period of the Cold War, a poisonously political time, but Doris Lessing reminds us - in perhaps the book's most striking achievement - of what has been forgotten: that it was a time also of idealism and hope, of a sense of personal responsibility for the world, and of generosity of the imagination. She describes how communism dominated the intellectual life of the 1950s - it is hard now to appreciate how much - and how she, like nearly all communists, became disillusioned with extreme and rhetorical politics and left communism behind. Walking in the Shade also evokes the bohemian days of a young writer and single mother in 1950s London: her early success as one of the new hopeful postwar writers whose novels and short stories received critical acclaim both in Britain and abroad; her work in the theater where she befriended Kenneth Tynan, John Osborne, Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson, and Arnold Wesker; her political activities through which she met such opinion makers of the time as E.P. Thompson, Bertrand Russell, and Henry Kissinger; and her romantic liaisons with men on the Left. Walking in the Shade ends in the winter of 1962-63. By this time, London - indeed Britain and all of Europe - had been rebuilt from ruins and poverty to newness and plenty. To the author it seemed that her life correspondingly climbed up from difficulty and dark."

Call number: PAL - PR6023.E833 Z478 1998

Doris Lessing: Conversations - Publisher's Marketing: "In 24 provocative interviews spanning several decades, Doris Lessing talks frankly to a variety of interviewers--among them Joyce Carol Oates and Studs Terkel--about a wide range of subjects. These conversations, informed by Ms. Lessing's unfailing intelligence and refreshing directness, present an invaluable view of the life and work of a distinguished contemporary writer."

Call number: PAL - PR6023.E833 Z467 1994

African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe - Publisher's Marketing: "British author Lessing recounts visits to her homeland, Zimbabwe, 25 years after her exile from old Southern Rhodesia for opposing the minority white government. "(Lessing's) insight into and sympathy for human beings of both races and all conditions is persuasive and affecting".--The New Yorker."

Call number: OPC - DT2904 .L47 1992

The Memoirs of a Survivor - Publisher's Marketing: "In a beleaguered city where rats and roving gangs terrorize the streets, where government has broken down and meaningless violence holds sway, a woman -- middle-aged and middle-class -- is brought a twelve-year-old girl and told that it is her responsibility to raise the child. This book, which the author has called "an attempt at autobiography," is that woman's journal -- a glimpse of a future only slightly more horrendous than our present, and of the forces that alone can save us from total destruction."

Call number: PAL - PR6023.E833 M4 1988

Prisons We Choose to Live Inside - Publisher's Marketing: "One of the world's most extraordinary writers addresses directly the prime question before us all: how to think for ourselves, how to understand what we know, how to pick a path in a world deluged with opinions and information, how to look at our society and ourselves with fresh eyes. A small book with high impact and enormous carrying power."

Call number: PAL - PR6023.E833 P7 1987

The Good Terrorist - Publisher's Marketing: ""The Good Terrorist" follows Alice Mellings, a woman who transforms her home into a headquarters for a group of radicals who plan to join the IRA. As Alice struggles to bridge her ideology and her bourgeois upbringing, her companions encounter unexpected challenges in their quest to incite social change against complacency and capitalism. With a nuanced sense of the intersections between the personal and the political, Nobel laureate Doris Lessing creates in "The Good Terrorist" a compelling portrait of domesticity and rebellion."

Call number: OPC - PR6023.E833 G66 1985

The Sirian Experiments

Call number: PAL - PR6023.E833 S57 1981

African Stories

Call number: PAL - PR6023.E833 A15 1965

The Golden Notebook -

Doris Lessing's best-known and most influential novel, "The Golden Noteboo"k retains its extraordinary power and relevance decades after its initial publication."

Call number: PAL - PR6023.E833 G6 1973

Wise Blood/The Violent Bear It Away/Everything That Rises Must Converge

Call number: OPC - Paperback rack

A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories - Publisher's Marketing: "The collection that established O'Connor's reputation as one of the american masters of the short story. The volume contains the celebrated title story, a tale of the murderous fugitive The Misfit, as well as "The Displaced Person" and eight other stories."

Call number: PAL - PS3565.C57 G6 2001

A Good Man Is Hard to Find

Call number: OPC - PS3565.C57 G6 1993

O'Connor: Collected Works - Publisher's Marketing: "Flannery O'Connor, a unique and important figure in the Southern literary tradition, was one of the finest writers of the twentieth century. This volume, containing her two novels, short stories, essays and letters, is the only complete collection of her works."

Call number: SAC - PS3565 .C57 1988

Call number: OPC - PS3565 .C57 1988

The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor - Publisher's Marketing: "Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Special Award
"I have come to think that the true likeness of Flannery O'Connor will be painted by herself, a self-portrait in words, to be found in her letters . . . There she stands, a phoenix risen from her own words: calm, slow, funny, courteous, both modest and very sure of herself, intense, sharply penetrating, devout but never pietistic, downright, occasionally fierce, and honest in a way that restores honor to the word."--Sally Fitzgerald, from the Introduction"

Call number: PAL - PS3565.C57 Z48 1979

The Complete Stories - Publisher's Marketing: "Winner of the National Book AwardThe publication of this extraordinary volume firmly established Flannery O'Connor's monumental contribution to American fiction. There are thirty-one stories here in all, including twelve that do not appear in the only two story collections O'Connor put together in her short lifetime--"Everything That Rises Must Converge "and "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," O'Connor published her first story, "The Geranium," in 1946, while she was working on her master's degree at the University of Iowa. Arranged chronologically, this collection shows that her last story, "Judgement Day"--sent to her publisher shortly before her death--is a brilliantly rewritten and transfigured version of "The Geranium." Taken together, these stories reveal a lively, penetrating talent that has given us some of the most powerful and disturbing fiction of the twentieth century. Also included is an introduction by O'Connor's longtime editor and friend, Robert Giroux."

Call number: PAL - PS3565.C57 C6 1971

Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose - Publisher's Marketing: "After her death in 1964 Flannery O'Connor left behind a body of unpublished essays and lectures as well as a number of critical articles that had appeared in scattered publications in her lifetime. The brilliant pieces in "Mystery and Manners," selected and edited by O'Connor's lifelong friends Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, are characterized by the boldness and simplicity of her style, a fine-tuned wit, understated perspicacity, and profound faith."

Call number: PAL - PS3565.C57 A6 1969

Everything That Rises Must Converge - Publisher's Marketing: "Flannery O'Connor was working on "Everything That Rises Must Converge" at the time of her death. This collection is an exquisite legacy from a genius of the American short story, in which she scrutinizes territory familiar to her readers: race, faith, and morality. The stories encompass the comic and the tragic, the beautiful and the grotesque; each carries her highly individual stamp and could have been written by no one else."

Call number: PAL - PS3565.C57 E8 1965

Wise Blood - Publisher's Marketing: ""Wise Blood," Flannery O'Connor's astonishing and haunting first novel, is a classic of twentieth-century literature. Focused on the story of Hazel Motes, a twenty-two-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his innate, desperate fate, this tale of redemption, retribution, false prophets, blindness, blindings, and wisdoms gives us one of the most riveting characters in twentieth-century American fiction."

Call number: PAL - PS3565 .C57 1952