Breaking into the Literary Pantheon

If you spend enough time in English classes or just around books, you learn that there are a few canonical names: Milton, Eliot, Faulkner, Woolf. These authors’ works are well-chronicled and widely, carefully read. And since many of these greats have come and gone, their bodies of work aren’t usually getting any bigger. Being widely read in the canon is a bit easier when the old masters aren’t coming out with new material anymore. Rarely does a newly-discovered work come up to claim a place among the classics.

But sometimes we get lucky. Sometimes we receive a gift wrapped between two covers. Right now, we’re getting very lucky.

I read in a New Yorker article that Flannery O’Connor’s prayer journal is about to be published. Certainly, a journal may not as carefully crafted or audience-aware as a collection of short stories or a novel, but for writers and students of literature – and especially those who study American Southern literature – this journal offers new insight into the life and thoughts of one of the most important voices in American literature. O’Connor, a devout Catholic growing up and living in the protestant south, made her journal “a record of a Christian who hoped the rightful orientation of her own life would contribute to righting the orientation of the world.” Indeed, as excerpts demonstrate, this journal is a record of the writer’s reconciliation of her faith and her ambitions to become a writer. As her stories often do, O’Connor’s prayer journal offers to connect with readers on several levels: as writers, as believers, as doubters of any kind.

And that’s not all. Sometimes, lucky just doesn’t seem to cover it.

Just over a week ago, HarperCollins announced that they would publish J.R.R. Tolkien’s translation of the old epic Beowulf in late May. Tolkien’s notes and comments on the work itself and a previously unpublished story will accompany the translation. Unlike O’Connor, posthumous publication from Tolkien is a bit less rare than a blue moon. Tolkien lovers though (I count myself among them) and Beowulf scholars (I don’t quite fit that bill) will be enticed at the prospect of reading afresh Tolkien’s elegant, winding prose and read his collected thoughts on the world’s oldest extant English manuscript. Tolkien’s scholarship, which focuses on the monsters in the tale, is held in very high esteem, but that’s not too surprising.

Nevertheless, it’s an exciting time. Both Tolkien and O’Connor are in the Valhalla of writers, and new material just doesn’t come around very frequently. But how does this new material fit in with the rest of their work? How should we think about these writings, how do we apply them to what we’ve already read? What do you think? Have you heard of any new works from the old greats?


Mac McKee is a junior Business Administration major at Washington and Lee.  He has a passion for writing and the study of languages.