WRITER

Flannery O'Connor

1925 - 1964

Flannery O'Connor

Mary Flannery O'Connor (March 25, 1925 – August 3, 1964) was an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. She wrote two novels and 31 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. She was a Southern writer, who often wrote in a sardonic Southern Gothic style, and she relied, heavily, on regional settings and grotesque characters, often in violent situations. Read more on Wikipedia

Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of Flannery O'Connor has received more than 3,865,211 page views. Her biography is available in 44 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 39 in 2019). Flannery O'Connor is the 2,146th most popular writer (down from 2,084th in 2019), the 2,681st most popular biography from United States (up from 2,731st in 2019) and the 233rd most popular American Writer.

Memorability Metrics

3.9M
Page Views (PV)
55.71
Historical Popularity Index (HPI)
44
Languages Editions (L)
2.67
Effective Languages (L*)
5.16
Coefficient of Variation (CV)

Notable Works

Everything That Rises Must Converge

Fiction, Social life and customs, English Short stories

The death of Flanner O'Connor at thirty-nine marked the loss of one of America's most gifted contemporary writers at the height of her powers. This volume is the collection on which she was working at the time of her death. Each of the nine stores carries her highly individual stamp, and could have been writte by no one else. <i>Everything That Rises Must Converge</i> is the most worth memorial that Flannery O'Connor could have left behind to be added to her three previously published books. As Elizabeth Bishop has written, "I am sure her few books will live on and on in American literature." --back cover

1965

Wise blood

religion, Fiction in English, Religious Psychology

Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor's astonishing and haunting first novel, is a classic of twentieth-century literature. It is the story of Hazel Motes, a twenty-two-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his inborn, desperate fate. He falls under the spell of a "blind" street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate fifteen-year-old daughter, Sabbath Lily. In an ironic, malicious gesture of his own non-faith, and to prove himself a greater cynic than Hawks, Motes founds the Church Without Christ, but is still thwarted in his efforts to lose God. He meets Enoch Emery, a young man with "wise blood," who leads him to a mummified holy child and whose crazy maneuvers are a manifestation of Motes's existential struggles. This tale of redemption, retribution, false prophets, blindness, blindings, and wisdom gives us one of the most riveting characters in American fiction.

1952

The Complete Stories

American Short stories, Fiction, Social life and customs

There are thirty-one stories here in all, including twelve that do not appear in the only two story collections O'Connor put together in her short lifetime--Everything That Rises Must Converge and A Good Man Is Hard to Find. O'Connor published her first story, "The Geranium," in 1946, while she was working on her master's degree at the University of Iowa. Arranged chronologically, this collection shows that her last story, "Judgement Day"--sent to her publisher shortly before her death—is a brilliantly rewritten and transfigured version of "The Geranium." Taken together, these stories reveal a lively, penetrating talent that has given us some of the most powerful and disturbing fiction of the twentieth century. Also included is an introduction by O'Connor's longtime editor and friend, Robert Giroux.

1967

O'Connor, Three by Flannery

1964

The violent bear it away

Fiction in English, Orphans, Fiction

1960

A good man is hard to find and other stories

Social life and customs, Fiction, short stories

The collection that established O’Connor’s reputation as one of the American masters of the short story. The volume contains the celebrated title story, a tale of the murderous fugitive The Misfit, as well as “The Displaced Person” and eight other stories.

1955