One of the things I’m reading right now is The Habit of Being, the collected volume of Flannery O’Connor letters edited by Sally Fitzgerald.

In a January, 1949 letter to her agent, Elizabeth McKee, O’Connor  notes that “James Ross, a writer who is here [at Yaddo], is looking for an agent.  He wrote a very fine book called, They Don’t Dance Much.  It didn’t sell much.  If you are interested in him, I daresay he would be glad to hear form you.  Right now he wants to sell some stories he is reworking.”  Don’t we all.

For much of 1949, O’Connor was in conflict with Rinehart over Wise Blood. We all know who she became in the years to follow, but They Don’t Dance Much (originally published by Houghton Mifflin in 1940), like Ross, seems to have only grown in obscurity.  Obscure might not quite equal lost, but by 1975, Southern Illinois University dubbed They Don’t Dance Much lost enough for reprint in their Lost American Fiction series.  This book is also mentioned by Raymond Chandler in in his collected letters, and the (count them!) three reviews on Amazon are overwhelmingly positive.

Since before my time in Divinity School, I’ve been fascinated by the idea of lost texts, missing sources, and phantom documents.  Things we only know about because they’re quoted or listed in still-extant works.  They Don’t Dance Much feels like one of those pieces, so when I found out that it actually exists, I ordered it.  I’ll review it here in the coming weeks.

It took Ross 35 years to go from obscure to lost and back.  What books first published in 1975 have a similar story now, 35 years hence, and deserve another look?