Discussed in this essay:

Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942–1963, edited by Katherine A. Powers. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 480 pages. $35.

J. F. Powers, 81, Dies; Wrote About Priests,” the New York Times headlined its obituary in 1999. It was a bluntly chiseled epitaph for a writer who (to judge from the obit alone) had had a brilliant career. Born in Jacksonville, Illinois, in 1917, Powers began writing stories in Chicago in his early twenties; a book of them, Prince of Darkness, was published in 1947, just as he turned thirty.…