The Oxford Companion to American Literature | O'Connor, Flannery
O'Connor, Flannery( 1925–64), Georgia author, whose Gothic novels are Wise Blood (1952), about a young religious fanatic who tries to establish a Church Without Christ in his Georgia mountain region; and The Violent Bear It Away (1960), a macabre tale set in the backwoods of Georgia and presenting the fanatical mission of a boy intent on baptizing a still younger boy. Her stories, set in the South and also grotesque, are collected in A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955, titled The Artificial Nigger in England), Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965), and Complete Stories (1971). Occasional prose was collected as Mystery and Manners (1969) and letters as The Habit of Being (1979). O'Connor represents a combination unique in modern American fiction: a writer deeply religious exploring the conflict between the sacred and the profane, and sometimes their merger, in a grittily regional setting. Her...
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