Flannery O' Connor
Critics note novels
Wise Blood
(1952) and
The Violent Bear It Away
(1960) and short stories, collected in such works as
A Good Man Is Hard to Find
(1955), of American writer Mary Flannery O'Connor for their explorations of religious faith and a spare literary style.
The Georgia state college for women educated O’Connor, who then studied writing at the Iowa writers' workshop and wrote much of Wise Blood at the colony of artists at Yaddo in upstate New York. She lived most of her adult life on Andalusia, ancestral farm of her family outside Milledgeville, Georgia.
O’Connor wrote
Everything That Rises Must Converge
(1964). When she died at the age of 39 years, America lost one of its most gifted writers at the height of her powers.
Survivors published her essays were published in
Mystery and Manners
(1969). Her
Complete Stories
, published posthumously in 1972, won the national book award for that year. Survivors published her letters in
The Habit of Being
(1979). In 1988, the Library of America published
Collected Works
of Flannery O'Connor, the first so honored postwar writer.
People in an online poll in 2009 voted her Complete Stories as the best book to win the national book award in the six-decade history of the contest.
“When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God's business.”
“The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode.”
“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it”