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O'Connor and Leopold: An Unlikely Pairing?
Ido Leopold died fighting a grass fire in Wisconsin and was buried in his childhood home of Burlington, Iowa, in the spring of 1948 (Meine 519-21). Less than a hundred miles away, Flannery O'Connor was living in Iowa City as a Rinehart fellow and a teaching assistant as she labored on Wise Blood (Gooch ch. 4, 117-47). O'Connor had graduated from the State University of Iowa's MFA program the previous summer; in a few months she would move to Yaddo, where she would make friendships and contacts crucial to her in later years (Gooch ch. 5, 148-85). The spatial and temporal overlap of O'Connor's and Leopold's careers may be coincidental. Nevertheless, the overlap in their contributions to American letters seems more than that. It is the intent of this essay to explain why, and in the process to point the way to further inquiry.
For readers of American literature, Leopold is likely the less familiar of the two. Among other professional roles, he had been a forester in the American Southwest and a professor of game management at the University of Wisconsin. He excelled at both endeavors, but his greatest contribution was as a writer. Trained as a scientist, through his career he also became a self-taught philosopher as he pondered problems of soil erosion and game scarcity on land formerly teeming with life. His work has endured not only because it is founded on sound science and carefully reasoned conclusions but also because his prose is as fine as that of Thoreau, Muir, Austin, and Carson. Lawrence Buell has justly called Leopold "the father of modern environmental ethics" (183).
Leopold's best-known work, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, was published by Oxford University Press in 1949. It is doubtful that O'Connor ever read this book or that she would have recognized Leopold's name. She never mentions him in her correspondence or reviews. Even so, there is good reason to pair these two writers. Though O'Connor is not often classed as an advocate for nature, a strong and consistent ecological current runs through her work. Within a decade of her death, critics were limning this tendency in her fiction in broad strokes.1 More recently, critics have...