An anecdote of Flannery O'Connor

(Read at the www.abc.net.au on 17 February, 2002 in regards to a radio interview)

When a woman wrote to Flannery O'Connor saying that one of her stories "left a bad taste in my mouth", Flannery wrote back: "You weren't supposed to eat it". Flannery O'Connor was one of the major American short story writers of the 20th century. The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor, posthumously collected in 1971, won the National Book Award for Fiction and has remained in print ever since. But her widespread success as a master of Southern Gothic belies the difficulty her work poses for many readers. The violence and "grotesque" elements of her stories often seem alienating and harsh but they incorporate her transcendent concerns.

A devout Catholic in the heart of the fundamentalist Bible Belt, Flannery O'Connor spent most of her life on a dairy farm in Georgia with her widowed mother, raising peafowl, and died there of lupus in 1964, at the age of thirty nine.