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A garrulous grandmother and a roaming 
bandit face off on a dirt road.

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A Bible salesman lures a one-legged 
philosopher into a barn.

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A traveling handyman teaches a deaf woman 
her first word on an old plantation.

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From her farm in rural Georgia,

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surrounded by a flock of pet birds,

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Flannery O’Connor scribbled tales 
of outcasts,

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intruders and misfits staged in 
the world she knew best:

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the American South.

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She published two novels,

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but is perhaps best known 
for her short stories,

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which explored small-town life 
with stinging language, offbeat humor,

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and delightfully unsavory scenarios.

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In her spare time O’Connor drew cartoons,

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and her writing is also 
brimming with caricature.

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In her stories, a mother has a face 
“as broad and innocent as a cabbage,”

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a man has as much drive as a “floor mop,”

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and one woman’s body 
is shaped like “a funeral urn.”

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The names of her characters 
are equally sly.

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Take the story “The Life You 
Save May be Your Own,”

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where the one-handed drifter Tom Shiftlet 
wanders into the lives

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of an old woman named Lucynell Crater

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and her deaf and mute daughter.

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Though Mrs Crater is self-assured,

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her isolated home is falling apart.

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At first, we may be suspicious 
of Shiftlet’s motives

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when he offers to help around the house,

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but O’Connor soon reveals 
the old woman to be

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just as scheming as her unexpected guest–

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and rattles the reader’s presumptions 
about who has the upper hand.

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For O’Connor, no subject was off limits.

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Though she was a devout Catholic,

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she wasn’t afraid to explore 
the possibility

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of pious thought and unpious behavior

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co-existing in the same person.

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In her novel The Violent Bear it Away,

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the main character grapples with the 
choice to become a man of God –

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but also sets fires and commits murder.

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The book opens with the reluctant prophet
in a particularly compromising position:

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“Francis Marion Tarwater’s uncle had been 
dead for only half a day

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when the boy got too drunk 
to finish digging his grave.”

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This leaves a passerby to “drag the body 
from the breakfast table

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where it was still sitting and bury it […]

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with enough dirt on top to keep 
the dogs from digging it up.”

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Though her own politics are still debated,

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O’Connor’s fiction could also be attuned
to the racism of the South.

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In “Everything that Rises Must Converge,”

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she depicts a son raging 
at his mother’s bigotry.

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But the story reveals that 
he has his own blind spots

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and suggests that simply recognizing evil

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doesn’t exempt his character 
from scrutiny.

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Even as O’Connor probes the most 
unsavory aspects of humanity,

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she leaves the door to redemption 
open a crack.

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In “A Good Man is Hard to Find,”

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she redeems an insufferable grandmother 
for forgiving a hardened criminal,

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even as he closes in on her family.

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Though we might balk at the price the 
woman pays for this redemption,

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we’re forced to confront the nuance
in moments

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we might otherwise consider 
purely violent or evil.

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O’Connor’s mastery of the grotesque

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and her explorations of the insularity and
superstition of the South

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led her to be classified as 
a Southern Gothic writer.

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But her work pushed beyond 
the purely ridiculous

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and frightening characteristics 
associated with the genre

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to reveal the variety and nuance 
of human character.

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She knew some of this variety 
was uncomfortable,

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and that her stories could be 
an acquired taste –

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but she took pleasure 
in challenging her readers.

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O’Connor died of lupus at the age of 39,

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after the disease had mostly confined her 
to her farm in Georgia for twelve years.

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During those years,

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she penned much of her most 
imaginative work.

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Her ability to flit between 
revulsion and revelation

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continues to draw readers to her endlessly
surprising fictional worlds.

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As her character Tom Shiftlet notes,

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the body is “like a house:

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it don’t go anywhere,

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but the spirit, lady,

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is like an automobile:

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always on the move.”