Overview

The American South. A turbulent world, fraught with the Civil Rights struggle and toxic religious tensions. Against the backdrop of mountainous sunsets and backwater shacks, deserted highways and small-town gas stations, people forge their own lives. We encounter murderers, escaped convicts, dysfunctional families, conmen, fanatics, farmhands, Bible salesmen, troubled children, gangsters, hypocrites, misfits and outcasts. These are characters marked by grotesque flaws, darkly humorous and oddly beautiful. Their complex humanity is revealed in apocalyptic moments of Gothic horror, absurdity and violence that transform all who witness them - and us, too, as we realise that nothing in our moral universe is black and white. Flannery O'Connor is the supreme tragicomic chronicler of these bodies and souls, her classic stories infused with the dazzling force of prophecy as one of the century's most visionary writers.

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Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, on 25th March 1925. She was raised as a devout Catholic in Milledgeville, where she moved after her father became gravely ill; he died when she was fifteen. After graduating from Peabody High School and Georgia State College for Women, she received her MFA from the writing programme at the University of Iowa in 1947; her first published story, 'The Geranium', was written while still a student. She then moved to New York where she continued to write, including her first novel, Wise Blood (1952), composed mainly at the nearby Yaddo artists' colony. In 1952 she learned that she was dying of lupus, the disease which afflicted her father. For the rest of her life, she and her mother lived on their ancestral farm, where she painted and raised peacocks, pheasants, swans, geese, chickens and ducks. In her lifetime, she published a second novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960) as well as a story collection, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955). Though seriously ill, O'Connor embarked on lecture tours, received an honorary degree from Smith College in 1963, and that same year, won the annual O'Henry short story awards (as well as in 1956). After her death on 3rd August 1964, aged just thirty-nine, another story collection, Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965), was published, as well as a volume of prose, Mystery and Manners (1969) and letters as The Habit of Being (1979). Her Complete Stories, published posthumously in 1972, won the National Book Award that year.

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