Flannery Oconnor
Research papers on Flannery O'Connor or her writings can be ordered from Paper Masters and focus on any literary style or element that O'Connor was known for. A Good Man is Hard to Find is her most famous work but our writers can focus on any of her short stories you need explicated.
Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) was an American writer, author of two novels and 32 short stories, best classified in the Southern Gothic tradition. Born in Savannah, Georgia, Mary Flannery O'Connor graduated from the Peabody Laboratory School in 1942 and entered the Georgia State College for Women. In 1946 she entered the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.
Flannery O'Connor
It was at the Iowa Workshop that she met several important literary talents, including Robert Penn Warren and Andrew Lytle, editor of the Sewanee Review, where many of her stories would be published. In 1951, she was diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus, the same disease that had killed her father when she was just 15. Flannery O'Connor retired to her family's farm in Georgia, expecting to live only a few more years. More than two-dozen of her short stories and both her novels were written over the next fourteen years as she battled lupus.
Flannery O'Connor died in 1964 at the age of 39 from complications of lupus. Her work reflects the following elements that she is well known for:
- A fascination with the grotesque
- Her devout Roman Catholic faith
- Her stories are generally set in her native South, reminiscent of that other great Southern Gothic writer, William Faulkner.
The University of Georgia Press awards the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction annually to an outstanding collection of short stories.