Flannery O'Connor
Encyclopedia
Mary Flannery O'Connor was an American
novelist, short-story writer
and essayist. An important voice in American literature
, O'Connor wrote two novels and 32 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. She was a Southern writer
who often wrote in a Southern Gothic
style and relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque
characters. O'Connor's writing also reflected her own Roman Catholic faith, and frequently examined questions of morality
and ethics
.
, the only child of Edward F. O'Connor and Regina Cline. O'Connor described herself as a "pigeon-toed child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I'll-bite-you complex." When O'Connor was six, she experienced her first brush with celebrity. The Pathé News
people filmed "Little Mary O'Connor" with her trained chicken, and showed the film around the country. She said, "When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathé News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been anticlimax.”
In 1937 O'Connor's father was diagnosed with the disease systemic lupus erythematosus
. The disease led to his eventual death on February 1, 1941, and the 15-year-old Flannery was left devastated.
O'Connor attended the Peabody Laboratory School, from which she graduated in 1942. She entered Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College & State University
), in an accelerated three-year program, and graduated in June 1945 with a Social Sciences
degree. In 1946, she was accepted into the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop
at the University of Iowa
, where she first went to study journalism. While there she got to know several important writers and critics who lectured or taught in the program, among them Robert Penn Warren
, John Crowe Ransom
, Robie Macauley
, Austin Warren
and Andrew Lytle. Lytle, for many years editor of the Sewanee Review
, was one of the earliest admirers of O'Connor's fiction. He later published several of her stories in the Sewanee Review, as well as critical essays on her work. Workshop director Paul Engle
was the first to read and comment on the initial drafts of what would become Wise Blood
.
In 1949, O'Connor met and eventually accepted an invitation to stay with Robert Fitzgerald
(the well-known translator of the classics) and his wife, Sally, in Redding, Connecticut
.
In 1951, like her father, she was diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus, and subsequently returned to her ancestral farm, Andalusia, in Milledgeville, Georgia
. Although expected to live only five more years, she managed fourteen. At Andalusia, she raised and nurtured some 100 peafowl
. Fascinated by birds of all kinds, she raised ducks, hens, geese, and any sort of exotic bird she could obtain, while incorporating images of peacocks into her books. She describes her peacocks in an essay entitled "The King of Birds." Despite her sheltered life, her writing reveals an uncanny grasp of the nuances of human behavior. She was a devout Catholic living in the "Bible Belt
," the Protestant South. She collected books on Catholic theology and at times gave lectures on faith and literature, traveling quite far despite her frail health. She also maintained a wide correspondence, including such famous writers as Robert Lowell
and Elizabeth Bishop
. She never married, relying for companionship on her correspondence and on her close relationship with her mother, Regina Cline O'Connor.
O'Connor completed more than two dozen short stories and two novels while battling lupus. She died on August 3, 1964, at the age of 39, of complications from lupus, at Baldwin County Hospital and was buried in Milledgeville, Georgia, at Memory Hill Cemetery
. Her mother died in 1997.
, O'Connor said: "anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic." Her texts usually take place in the South and revolve around morally flawed characters, while the issue of race often appears in the background. One of her trademarks is foreshadowing, giving a reader an idea of what will happen far before it happens. Most of her works feature disturbing elements, though she did not like to be characterized as cynical. "I am tired of reading reviews that call A Good Man brutal and sarcastic," she writes. "The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism... when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror."
Her two novels were Wise Blood
(1952) and The Violent Bear It Away
(1960). She also published two books of short stories: A Good Man Is Hard to Find
(1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge
(published posthumously in 1965).
She felt deeply informed by the sacramental, and by the Thomist notion that the created world is charged with God. Yet she would not write apologetic
fiction of the kind prevalent in the Catholic literature of the time, explaining that a writer's meaning must be evident in his or her fiction without didacticism
. She wrote ironic, subtly allegorical fiction about deceptively backward Southern characters, usually fundamentalist Protestants, who undergo transformations of character that to O'Connor's thinking brought them closer to the Catholic mind. The transformation is often accomplished through pain, violence, and ludicrous behavior in the pursuit of the holy. However grotesque the setting, she tried to portray her characters as they might be touched by divine grace
. This ruled out a sentimental understanding of the stories' violence, as of her own illness. O'Connor wrote: "Grace changes us and change is painful." She also had a deeply sardonic sense of humor, often based in the disparity between her characters' limited perceptions and the awesome fate awaiting them. Another source of humor is frequently found in the attempt of well-meaning liberals to cope with the rural South on their own terms. O'Connor uses such characters' inability to come to terms with race, poverty, and fundamentalism, other than in sentimental illusions, as an example of the failure of the secular world in the twentieth century.
However, several stories reveal that O'Connor was familiar with some of the most sensitive contemporary issues that her liberal and fundamentalist characters might encounter. She addressed the Holocaust in her famous story "The Displaced Person
," and racial integration
in "Everything that Rises Must Converge
." O'Connor's fiction often included references to the problem of race in the South; occasionally, racial issues come to the forefront, as in "The Artificial Nigger
," "Everything that Rises Must Converge," and "Judgment Day
," her last short story and a drastically rewritten version of her first published story, "The Geranium
." Fragments exist of an unfinished novel tentatively titled Why Do the Heathen Rage? that draws from several of her short stories, including "Why Do the Heathen Rage?," "The Enduring Chill," and "The Partridge Festival
."
Her best friend, Betty Hester
, received a weekly letter from O'Connor for more than a decade. These letters provided the bulk of the correspondence collected in The Habit of Being, a selection of O'Connor's letters edited by Sally Fitzgerald. The reclusive Hester was given the pseudonym "A.," and her identity was not known until after she killed herself in 1998. Much of O'Connor's best-known writing on religion, writing, and the South is contained in these and other letters, including letters written to her friends Brainard Cheney
and Samuel Ashley Brown
. The complete collection of the unedited letters between O'Connor and Hester was unveiled by Emory University
on May 12, 2007; the letters were given to the university in 1987 with the stipulation that they not be released to the public for 20 years.
The Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction
, named in honor of O'Connor by the University of Georgia Press
, is a prize given annually to an outstanding collection of short stories.
O'Connor was the first fiction writer born in the twentieth century to have her works collected and published by the Library of America
.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
novelist, short-story writer
Writer
A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....
and essayist. An important voice in American literature
American literature
American literature is the written or literary work produced in the area of the United States and its preceding colonies. For more specific discussions of poetry and theater, see Poetry of the United States and Theater in the United States. During its early history, America was a series of British...
, O'Connor wrote two novels and 32 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. She was a Southern writer
Southern literature
Southern literature is defined as American literature about the Southern United States or by writers from this region...
who often wrote in a Southern Gothic
Southern Gothic
Southern Gothic is a subgenre of Gothic fiction unique to American literature that takes place exclusively in the American South. It resembles its parent genre in that it relies on supernatural, ironic, or unusual events to guide the plot...
style and relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque
Grotesque
The word grotesque comes from the same Latin root as "Grotto", meaning a small cave or hollow. The original meaning was restricted to an extravagant style of Ancient Roman decorative art rediscovered and then copied in Rome at the end of the 15th century...
characters. O'Connor's writing also reflected her own Roman Catholic faith, and frequently examined questions of morality
Morality
Morality is the differentiation among intentions, decisions, and actions between those that are good and bad . A moral code is a system of morality and a moral is any one practice or teaching within a moral code...
and ethics
Ethics
Ethics, also known as moral philosophy, is a branch of philosophy that addresses questions about morality—that is, concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime, etc.Major branches of ethics include:...
.
Biography
O'Connor was born on March 25, 1925, in Savannah, GeorgiaSavannah, Georgia
Savannah is the largest city and the county seat of Chatham County, in the U.S. state of Georgia. Established in 1733, the city of Savannah was the colonial capital of the Province of Georgia and later the first state capital of Georgia. Today Savannah is an industrial center and an important...
, the only child of Edward F. O'Connor and Regina Cline. O'Connor described herself as a "pigeon-toed child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I'll-bite-you complex." When O'Connor was six, she experienced her first brush with celebrity. The Pathé News
Pathe News
Pathé Newsreels were produced from 1910 until the 1970s, when production of newsreels was in general stopped. Pathé News today is known as British Pathé and its archive of over 90,000 reels is fully digitised and online.-History:...
people filmed "Little Mary O'Connor" with her trained chicken, and showed the film around the country. She said, "When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathé News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been anticlimax.”
In 1937 O'Connor's father was diagnosed with the disease systemic lupus erythematosus
Systemic lupus erythematosus
Systemic lupus erythematosus , often abbreviated to SLE or lupus, is a systemic autoimmune disease that can affect any part of the body. As occurs in other autoimmune diseases, the immune system attacks the body's cells and tissue, resulting in inflammation and tissue damage...
. The disease led to his eventual death on February 1, 1941, and the 15-year-old Flannery was left devastated.
O'Connor attended the Peabody Laboratory School, from which she graduated in 1942. She entered Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College & State University
Georgia College & State University
Georgia College & State University is a public liberal arts university in Milledgeville, Georgia, United States, with approximately 7,000 students...
), in an accelerated three-year program, and graduated in June 1945 with a Social Sciences
Social sciences
Social science is the field of study concerned with society. "Social science" is commonly used as an umbrella term to refer to a plurality of fields outside of the natural sciences usually exclusive of the administrative or managerial sciences...
degree. In 1946, she was accepted into the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop
Iowa Writers' Workshop
The Program in Creative Writing, more commonly known as the Iowa Writers' Workshop, at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa, is a highly regarded graduate-level creative writing program in the United States...
at the University of Iowa
University of Iowa
The University of Iowa is a public state-supported research university located in Iowa City, Iowa, United States. It is the oldest public university in the state. The university is organized into eleven colleges granting undergraduate, graduate, and professional degrees...
, where she first went to study journalism. While there she got to know several important writers and critics who lectured or taught in the program, among them Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the influential literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935...
, John Crowe Ransom
John Crowe Ransom
John Crowe Ransom was an American poet, essayist, magazine editor, and professor.-Life:...
, Robie Macauley
Robie Macauley
Robie Mayhew Macauley was an editor, novelist and critic whose literary career spanned over 50 years.-Early life:...
, Austin Warren
Austin Warren
Austin Warren was an American literary critic, author, and professor of English.-Childhood and Education:...
and Andrew Lytle. Lytle, for many years editor of the Sewanee Review
Sewanee Review
The Sewanee Review is a literary journal established in 1892 and the oldest continuously published periodical of its kind in the United States. It incorporates original fiction and poetry, as well as essays, reviews, and literary criticism...
, was one of the earliest admirers of O'Connor's fiction. He later published several of her stories in the Sewanee Review, as well as critical essays on her work. Workshop director Paul Engle
Paul Engle
Paul Engle , noted American poet, editor, teacher, literary critic, novelist, and playwright. He is perhaps best remembered as the long-time director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and as founder of the International Writing Program , both at the University of Iowa.-Life:Engle is often mistakenly...
was the first to read and comment on the initial drafts of what would become Wise Blood
Wise Blood
Wise Blood is the first novel by American author Flannery O'Connor, published in 1952. The novel was assembled from several disparate stories first published in Mademoiselle, Sewanee Review, and Partisan Review...
.
In 1949, O'Connor met and eventually accepted an invitation to stay with Robert Fitzgerald
Robert Fitzgerald
Robert Stuart Fitzgerald was a poet, critic and translator whose renderings of the Greek classics "became standard works for a generation of scholars and students." He was best known as a translator of ancient Greek and Latin...
(the well-known translator of the classics) and his wife, Sally, in Redding, Connecticut
Redding, Connecticut
Mark Twain, a resident of the town in his old age, contributed the first books for a public library which was eventually named after him.-Government:...
.
In 1951, like her father, she was diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus, and subsequently returned to her ancestral farm, Andalusia, in Milledgeville, Georgia
Milledgeville, Georgia
Milledgeville is a city in and the county seat of Baldwin County in the U.S. state of Georgia. It is northeast of Macon, located just before Eatonton on the way to Athens along U.S. Highway 441, and it is located on the Oconee River. The relatively rapid current of the Oconee here made this an...
. Although expected to live only five more years, she managed fourteen. At Andalusia, she raised and nurtured some 100 peafowl
Peafowl
Peafowl are two Asiatic species of flying birds in the genus Pavo of the pheasant family, Phasianidae, best known for the male's extravagant eye-spotted tail, which it displays as part of courtship. The male is called a peacock, the female a peahen, and the offspring peachicks. The adult female...
. Fascinated by birds of all kinds, she raised ducks, hens, geese, and any sort of exotic bird she could obtain, while incorporating images of peacocks into her books. She describes her peacocks in an essay entitled "The King of Birds." Despite her sheltered life, her writing reveals an uncanny grasp of the nuances of human behavior. She was a devout Catholic living in the "Bible Belt
Bible Belt
Bible Belt is an informal term for a region in the southeastern and south-central United States in which socially conservative evangelical Protestantism is a significant part of the culture and Christian church attendance across the denominations is generally higher than the nation's average.The...
," the Protestant South. She collected books on Catholic theology and at times gave lectures on faith and literature, traveling quite far despite her frail health. She also maintained a wide correspondence, including such famous writers as Robert Lowell
Robert Lowell
Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV was an American poet, considered the founder of the confessional poetry movement. He was appointed the sixth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress where he served from 1947 until 1948...
and Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet and short-story writer. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1956 and a National Book Award Winner for Poetry in 1970. Elizabeth Bishop House is an artists' retreat in Great Village, Nova Scotia...
. She never married, relying for companionship on her correspondence and on her close relationship with her mother, Regina Cline O'Connor.
O'Connor completed more than two dozen short stories and two novels while battling lupus. She died on August 3, 1964, at the age of 39, of complications from lupus, at Baldwin County Hospital and was buried in Milledgeville, Georgia, at Memory Hill Cemetery
Memory Hill Cemetery
Memory Hill Cemetery is an American cemetery in Milledgeville, Georgia. The cemetery opened in 1804.-Notable Interments:*Thomas Petters Carnes, United States Representative for Georgia and state court judge....
. Her mother died in 1997.
Career
Regarding her emphasis of the grotesqueGrotesque
The word grotesque comes from the same Latin root as "Grotto", meaning a small cave or hollow. The original meaning was restricted to an extravagant style of Ancient Roman decorative art rediscovered and then copied in Rome at the end of the 15th century...
, O'Connor said: "anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic." Her texts usually take place in the South and revolve around morally flawed characters, while the issue of race often appears in the background. One of her trademarks is foreshadowing, giving a reader an idea of what will happen far before it happens. Most of her works feature disturbing elements, though she did not like to be characterized as cynical. "I am tired of reading reviews that call A Good Man brutal and sarcastic," she writes. "The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism... when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror."
Her two novels were Wise Blood
Wise Blood
Wise Blood is the first novel by American author Flannery O'Connor, published in 1952. The novel was assembled from several disparate stories first published in Mademoiselle, Sewanee Review, and Partisan Review...
(1952) and The Violent Bear It Away
The Violent Bear It Away
The Violent Bear It Away is a novel published in 1960 by American author Flannery O'Connor. It is the second and final novel that she published. The first chapter of the novel was published as the story "You Can't Be Any Poorer Than Dead," in the journal New World Writing, volume 8 in October 1955...
(1960). She also published two books of short stories: A Good Man Is Hard to Find
A Good Man Is Hard To Find
A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories is a collection of short stories by American author Flannery O'Connor. The collection was first published in 1955...
(1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge
Everything That Rises Must Converge
Everything That Rises Must Converge is a collection of short stories written by Flannery O'Connor during her final illness. The title of the collection and of the short story of the same name is taken from a passage from the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The collection was published...
(published posthumously in 1965).
She felt deeply informed by the sacramental, and by the Thomist notion that the created world is charged with God. Yet she would not write apologetic
Apologetics
Apologetics is the discipline of defending a position through the systematic use of reason. Early Christian writers Apologetics (from Greek ἀπολογία, "speaking in defense") is the discipline of defending a position (often religious) through the systematic use of reason. Early Christian writers...
fiction of the kind prevalent in the Catholic literature of the time, explaining that a writer's meaning must be evident in his or her fiction without didacticism
Didacticism
Didacticism is an artistic philosophy that emphasizes instructional and informative qualities in literature and other types of art. The term has its origin in the Ancient Greek word διδακτικός , "related to education/teaching." Originally, signifying learning in a fascinating and intriguing...
. She wrote ironic, subtly allegorical fiction about deceptively backward Southern characters, usually fundamentalist Protestants, who undergo transformations of character that to O'Connor's thinking brought them closer to the Catholic mind. The transformation is often accomplished through pain, violence, and ludicrous behavior in the pursuit of the holy. However grotesque the setting, she tried to portray her characters as they might be touched by divine grace
Divine grace
In Christian theology, grace is God’s gift of God’s self to humankind. It is understood by Christians to be a spontaneous gift from God to man - "generous, free and totally unexpected and undeserved" - that takes the form of divine favour, love and clemency. It is an attribute of God that is most...
. This ruled out a sentimental understanding of the stories' violence, as of her own illness. O'Connor wrote: "Grace changes us and change is painful." She also had a deeply sardonic sense of humor, often based in the disparity between her characters' limited perceptions and the awesome fate awaiting them. Another source of humor is frequently found in the attempt of well-meaning liberals to cope with the rural South on their own terms. O'Connor uses such characters' inability to come to terms with race, poverty, and fundamentalism, other than in sentimental illusions, as an example of the failure of the secular world in the twentieth century.
However, several stories reveal that O'Connor was familiar with some of the most sensitive contemporary issues that her liberal and fundamentalist characters might encounter. She addressed the Holocaust in her famous story "The Displaced Person
The Displaced Person
"The Displaced Person" is a short story by Flannery O'Connor. It was published in 1955 in her short story collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find. A devout Roman Catholic, O'Connor often used religious themes in her work and her own family hired a displaced person after World War II.- Plot summary...
," and racial integration
Racial integration
Racial integration, or simply integration includes desegregation . In addition to desegregation, integration includes goals such as leveling barriers to association, creating equal opportunity regardless of race, and the development of a culture that draws on diverse traditions, rather than merely...
in "Everything that Rises Must Converge
Everything That Rises Must Converge
Everything That Rises Must Converge is a collection of short stories written by Flannery O'Connor during her final illness. The title of the collection and of the short story of the same name is taken from a passage from the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The collection was published...
." O'Connor's fiction often included references to the problem of race in the South; occasionally, racial issues come to the forefront, as in "The Artificial Nigger
The Artificial Nigger
"The Artificial Nigger" is a short story by Flannery O'Connor. It was published in 1955 in her short story collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find. The title refers to statues popular in the Jim Crow-era South, depicting grotesque minstrelcy characters. Like most of her other works, the story...
," "Everything that Rises Must Converge," and "Judgment Day
Judgement Day (short story)
"Judgement Day" is a short story by Flannery O'Connor. It was published in 1965 in her short story collection Everything That Rises Must Converge. O'Connor finished the collection during her final battle with lupus. She died in 1964, just before her final book was published. A devout Roman...
," her last short story and a drastically rewritten version of her first published story, "The Geranium
The Geranium
"The Geranium" is an early short story by the American author Flannery O'Connor. It was first published in Accent: A Quarterly of New Literature in 1946 and is one of the six stories included in O'Connor's 1947 master's thesis The Geranium: A Collection of Short Stories...
." Fragments exist of an unfinished novel tentatively titled Why Do the Heathen Rage? that draws from several of her short stories, including "Why Do the Heathen Rage?," "The Enduring Chill," and "The Partridge Festival
The Partridge Festival
"The Partridge Festival" is a short story by Flannery O'Connor. It was published in 1961. A devout Roman Catholic, O'Connor often used religious themes in her work.- Plot summary :...
."
Her best friend, Betty Hester
Betty Hester
Hazel Elizabeth "Betty" Hester was an American correspondent of influential twentieth-century writers, including Flannery O'Connor and Iris Murdoch. Hester wrote several short stories, poems, diaries, and philosophical treatises, none of which were published.-Biography:Hester was born in Rome,...
, received a weekly letter from O'Connor for more than a decade. These letters provided the bulk of the correspondence collected in The Habit of Being, a selection of O'Connor's letters edited by Sally Fitzgerald. The reclusive Hester was given the pseudonym "A.," and her identity was not known until after she killed herself in 1998. Much of O'Connor's best-known writing on religion, writing, and the South is contained in these and other letters, including letters written to her friends Brainard Cheney
Brainard Cheney
Brainard Cheney was a novelist, playwright and essayist from Georgia associated primarily with the literary movement known as the Agrarians.-Biography:...
and Samuel Ashley Brown
Samuel Ashley Brown
Samuel Ashley Brown was a professor emeritus at the University of South Carolina who taught English and comparative literature...
. The complete collection of the unedited letters between O'Connor and Hester was unveiled by Emory University
Emory University
Emory University is a private research university in metropolitan Atlanta, located in the Druid Hills section of unincorporated DeKalb County, Georgia, United States. The university was founded as Emory College in 1836 in Oxford, Georgia by a small group of Methodists and was named in honor of...
on May 12, 2007; the letters were given to the university in 1987 with the stipulation that they not be released to the public for 20 years.
The Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction
Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction
The Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction is an annual prize awarded by the University of Georgia Press named in honor of the American short story writer and novelist Flannery O'Connor....
, named in honor of O'Connor by the University of Georgia Press
University of Georgia Press
The University of Georgia Press or UGA Press is a publishing house and is a member of the Association of American University Presses.Founded in 1938, the UGA Press is a division of the University of Georgia and is located on the campus in Athens, Georgia, USA...
, is a prize given annually to an outstanding collection of short stories.
O'Connor was the first fiction writer born in the twentieth century to have her works collected and published by the Library of America
Library of America
The Library of America is a nonprofit publisher of classic American literature.- Overview and history :Founded in 1979 with seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, the LoA has published over 200 volumes by a wide range of authors from Mark Twain to Philip...
.
A Catholic Life
From 1956 through 1964, O'Connor wrote more than one hundred book reviews for two Catholic diocesan newspapers in Georgia: The Bulletin, and The Southern Cross. According to fellow reviewer Joey Zuber, the wide range of books O'Connor chose to review demonstrated that she was profoundly intellectual. Her reviews consistently confront theological and ethical themes in books written by the most serious and demanding theologians of her time. Professor of English Carter Martin, an authority on O'Connor's writings, notes simply that her "book reviews are at one with her religious life".Short story collections
- A Good Man Is Hard to FindA Good Man Is Hard To FindA Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories is a collection of short stories by American author Flannery O'Connor. The collection was first published in 1955...
, 1955 - Everything That Rises Must ConvergeEverything That Rises Must ConvergeEverything That Rises Must Converge is a collection of short stories written by Flannery O'Connor during her final illness. The title of the collection and of the short story of the same name is taken from a passage from the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The collection was published...
, 1965 - The Complete StoriesThe Complete Stories (O'Connor)The Complete Stories is a short story collection by Flannery O'Connor. It was published in 1971 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It comprises the stories in A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge, plus several previously unavailable stories.-Contents:*"The Geranium"*"The...
, 1971
Other works
- Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, 1969
- The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor, 1979
- The Presence of Grace: and Other Book Reviews, 1983
- Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works, 1988
Further reading
- The Abbess of Andalusia, 2009
- Bloom, Harold (Ed.), Flannery O'Connor
- Postmarked Milledgeville: A Guide to Flannery O’Connor’s Correspondence in Libraries and Archives. Georgia College & State University. 2002
- Flannery O'Connor: An Annotated Reference Guide to Criticism Timberlane Books by R. Neil Scott (Timberlane Books, 2002), 2002.
- Ralph Wood, Flannery O'Connor and the Christ Haunted South, 2004.
External links
- "Southern Discomfort", By Wendy Lesser BookforumBookforumBookforum is a New York-based magazine devoted to books and the discussion of literature. It is edited by Albert Mobilio, Chris Lehmann, , and Michael Miller.-History: Bookforum was launched in 1994 as a literary supplement to Artforum...
(Feb/Mar 2009). - The Flannery O'Connor Repository
- Flannery O'Connor Collection at the Georgia College & State University.
- Postmarked Milledgeville Flannery O'Connor's letters
- Flannery O'Connor entry in New Georgia Encyclopedia
- Flannery O'Connor's Private Life Revealed in Letters - All Things ConsideredAll Things ConsideredAll Things Considered is the flagship news program on the American network National Public Radio. It was the first news program on NPR, and is broadcast live worldwide through several outlets...
audio file, 6mins. May 12, 2007 - JCO on Flannery O'Connor Five O'Connor essays by Joyce Carol OatesJoyce Carol OatesJoyce Carol Oates is an American author. Oates published her first book in 1963 and has since published over fifty novels, as well as many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction...
- "Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor" A review by the Oxonian Review 27 April 2009 Issue 9.1
- Andalusia: Photographs of Flannery O'Conner's Farm." Southern Spaces, 28 April 2008. Glimpsing Andalusia in the O'Connor-Hester Letters." Southern Spaces, 23 October 2008.