1. Using specific examples from “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” discuss O’Connor’s view of the family as she presents it in the story. 2. How are the values of the two main characters in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” shown to be damaging to the […]

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Any individual who works with the fiction of Flannery O’Connor for any length of time cannot help but be impressed by the high degree of mastery she displays in her production of what must ultimately be considered a type of religious propaganda. In story after story, she brings her characters […]

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Mary Flannery O’Connor, the only child of Edward Francis O’Connor and Regina Cline O’Connor, was born in Savannah, Georgia, on March 25, 1925. When she was five years old, a Pathe newsreel featured her and a pet Bantam chicken possessed of the ability to walk both backward and forward. Some […]

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In her final story, “Judgement Day,” O’Connor returned for part of her material to her earliest published story, “The Geranium,” which first appeared in 1946. Manuscript evidence indicates that O’Connor reworked the material and entitled it “An Exile in the East” before she finally settled on the present version and […]

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The overt religious message presented in “Revelation” is used again by O’Connor in “Parker’s Back.” This story was composed by O’Connor while she was lying in the hospital a few weeks before her death. The story has the salvation of a hard-drinking, woman-chasing heathen as its main theme. The protagonist, […]

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In a 1959 interview with a writer for the Atlanta Journal, O’Connor told a reporter that she could wait for a larger audience for her fiction because “A few readers go a long way if they’re the right kind.” She went on to say, “You want, of course, to get […]

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On the surface, “Everything That Rises Must Converge” appears to be a simple story. Finally, it seems, O’Connor has written a story which we can easily read and understand without having to struggle with abstract religious symbolism. Mrs. Chestny is a bigot who feels that blacks should rise, “but on […]

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Hulga Hopewell of “Good Country People” is a unique character in O’Connor’s fictional world. Although O’Connor uses the intellectual, or the pseudo-intellectual, in one of her novels and in seven of her short stories, Hulga is the only female in the bunch. Her gender, however, does not keep her from […]

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On more than one occasion, O’Connor wrote to friends that her favorite story, among those she had written, was “The Artificial Nigger” and that it was “probably the best thing I’ll ever write.” Although she wrote to another friend, “My disposition is a combination of Nelson’s and Hulga’s” (the protagonist […]

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As we noted in discussing “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” O’Connor was able to make use of events which occurred around Milledgeville or else were reported in the newspapers and magazines which she read. The first version of “The Displaced Person” appears to have been at least partly […]

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