To read Flannery O'Connor's fiction is to be amused, provoked, and pushed to reconsider ourselves and our place in the world. A Roman Catholic and a native of Georgia, O'Connor created stories that inimitably blend humor, horror, and the mysteries of faith. While her writing is richly specific, evoking the dusty back roads and quirky characters of the American South, it deals powerfully with universal questions: What does it mean to be good? How should we live? What is the meaning of death? How can the divine penetrate the everyday world? In her relatively short lifetime (1925-64), O'Connor created a powerful body of work, including two novels and a number of short stories and nonfiction pieces.
In O'Connor's stories, deceptively ordinary situations a bus ride, an encounter with a traveling salesman, a family automobile trip erupt into life-altering revelations. In her essays, O'Connor delves deeply into the mystery of writing, why people do it, struggle over it, sacrifice so much of themselves in order to do it.
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