I’ve not heard of her before this article.
I’ll be reading for about this writer.
The story of her living with severe and chronic health problems may be interesting. Each life has it’s own inadvertent ‘guard rails’ and ‘speed bumps’ to navigate.
Not to belittle her work or originality by stereotyping her, O’Connor was part of the Southern Gothic School, sometimes referred to as “The day the hogs ate Willie”. The picaresque characters in Mark Twain’s writing were certainly an inspiration for the Southern Gothics, but they dragged them into much a darker place in order to explore the contradictions of the post-bellum Southern culture.
“A Good Man is Hard to Find,” “Good Country People,” and “The Lame Shall Enter First” are great short stories, especially the first. Flannery was a great shock short story writer.
Her biggest driver was the way she learned to deal with her terminal illnesses. Many of us on this forum have terminal illnesses that we have dealt with. Many former FR’s have left us for the World to Come. How you deal with impending death is extremely important. Some succomb to it in a most debilitating way. Some, Like O’Connor, learn to live with their impending demise, and even prosper spiritually because of it. It reminds one of the Stanley Kubrick classic movie “Dr. Strangelove: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”. So, when trying to sort out one’s feelings on their mortality and pending death, you should embrace, learn from it, and learn to control your fears. This is what Madam O’Connor preached in her works. So we should face death as a positive experience and learn from it. You cannot defeat an enemy before learning what it is - passing from this world to the next, and part of life itself.