1. “All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.”
Flannery O’Connor
Born: Savannah, GA, moved to Milledgeville, GA at age of 12; systemic lupus eventually took her life at age 39.

2. Uniqueness of O’Connor
Profoundly religious –Catholic upbringing; called herself “the Catholic novelist in the Protestant South”
Painstaking & disciplined writer
Southern Gothic Style –at times a deeply sardonic sense of humor
Increasingly concerned with race relations towards the end of her life
Lupus –caused her to develop a deep sensitivity to misfits & outsiders; showed sympathy to pain & suffering of others
Influences: Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne (interested in the grotesque realm & dark side of human nature)
Fascinated by birds of all kinds; raised ducks, hens, geese, and any sort of exotic bird she could obtain; often incorporated images of peacocks in her books

3. Her Works ►2 novels: Wise Blood (1952) The Violent Bear It Away (1960)
► 2 books of short stories:
A Good Man Is Hard to Find &
Other Stories (1955)
Everything That Rises Must
Converge (posthumously in 1965)
► 32 short stories
"Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days."

4. “I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best.”
Her Formal Education
1945: graduated from GA State College for Women
1947: finished masters degree in creative writing from Univ. of Iowa (prestigious writers’ workshop)
“I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best.”

5. Her Home Each year the University of GA gives out an award
called The Flannery O’Connor Award for short fiction.
Birth place & childhood home of Flannery O’Connor – Lafayette Square, Savannah, GA

6. O’Connor Remembered The Atlanta Journal
Right: O’Connor, later in life, as lupus began to take its toll; Below: the typewriter where she pounded out her Southern Gothic stories.
The Atlanta Journal  
observed that O'Connor's "deep spirituality qualified her to speak with a forcefulness not often matched in American literature."

7. Patrick Galloway, Critic
One Critics Remarks:
“Flannery O'Connor is a Christian writer, and her work is message-oriented, yet she is far too brilliant a stylist to tip her hand; like all good writers, crass didacticism is abhorrent to her.
Nevertheless, she achieves what no Christian writer has ever achieved: a type of writing that stands up on both literary and the religious grounds, and succeeds in doing justice to both.”
Patrick Galloway, Critic
One month before she died in August 1964 she made this chilling comment: “The wolf, I’m afraid, is inside tearing up the place.”