Critics note novels
Wise Blood
(1952) and
The Violent Bear It Away
(1960) and short stories, collected in such works as
A Good Man Is Hard to Find
(1955), of American writer Mary Flannery O'Connor for their explorations of religious faith and a spare literary style.
The Georgia state college for women educated O’Connor, who then studied writing at the Iowa writers' workshop and wrote much of Wise Blood at the colony of artists at Yaddo in upstate New York. She lived most of her adult life on Andalusia, ancestral farm of her family outside Milledgeville, Georgia.
O’Connor wrote
Everything That Rises Must Converge
(1964). When she died at the age of 39 years, America lost one of its most gifted writers at the height of her powers.
Survivors published her essays were published in
Mystery and Manners
(1969). Her
Complete Stories
, published posthumously in 1972, won the national book award for that year. Survivors published her letters in
The Habit of Being
(1979). In 1988, the Library of America published
Collected Works
of Flannery O'Connor, the first so honored postwar writer.
People in an online poll in 2009 voted her Complete Stories as the best book to win the national book award in the six-decade history of the contest.
Antología del cuento norteamericano
Ambrose Bierce & Edgar Allan Poe & Jack London & Edith Wharton & John Steinbeck & Mark Twain & Henry James & Herman Melville & Bret Harte & Philip Roth & Washington Irving & Willa Cather & Richard Yates & Paul Bowles & Stephen Crane & Raymond Carver & T. C. Boyle & O. Henry & Irwin Shaw & Richard Ford & Bernard Malamud & Sherwood Anderson & John Cheever & James Thurber & Eudora Welty & Tim O’Brien & John Updike & Ralph Ellison & Flannery O’Connor & Lorrie Moore & Donald Barthelme & Robert Penn Warren & Tobias Wolff & Ann Beattie & Peter Taylor & Kate Chopin & James Baldwin & Joy Williams & Katherine Anne Porter & John O’Hara & Joel Chandler Harris & Sarah Orne Jewett & Francis Scott Fitzgerald & Dorothy Parker & S. J. Perelman & Jamaica Kincaid & William H. Gass & William Carlos Williams & Grace Paley & Leonard Michaels & Barry Hannah & Bharati Mukherjee & Conrad Aiken & Delmore Schwartz & John Edgar Wideman & Kay Boyle & Richard Bausch & Ring Lardner & Stanley Elkin & Stuart Dybek & William F