Flannery O’Connor

Flannery O’Connor (born March 25, 1925, Savannah, Georgia, U.S.—died August 3, 1964, Milledgeville, Georgia) was an American novelist and short-story writer whose works, usually set in the rural American South and often treating of alienation, concern the relationship between the individual and God. In addition to her exceptional skill with the short-story form, O’Connor is regarded as a master of the Southern gothic, a style of writing often characterized by grotesque, macabre, or fantastic incidents in fictional works set in the South.

O’Connor’s corpus is notable for the seeming incongruity of a devout Roman Catholic whose darkly comic works commonly feature startling acts of violence and unsympathetic, often depraved, characters. She explained the prevalence of brutality in her stories by noting that violence “is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace.” It is this divine stripping of human comforts and hubris, along with the attendant degradation of the corporeal, that stands as the most salient feature of O’Connor’s work.