One writer who seems to have evolved as a natural by-product of these two revolutionary literary genres is Flannery O’Connor, a writer whose name is most often associated with stories of violence. She was sometimes referred to as a “Southern Gothic” writer because of her fascination with grotesque incidents and odd complex characters. This use of grotesque humor and the rural southern dialect of her characters were common elements in her short stories. These dark comedies, “often [forced] readers to confront physical deformity, spiritual depravity, and the violence they often engender”(Downes).
She began writing while a student at Georgia State College for Women in her hometown and in 1947 earned an M.F.A. degree from the University of Iowa. The author was born March 25, 1925 in Savannah, Georgia and died August 3, 1964 in Milledgeville, Georgia of kidney failure, a complication of disseminated lupus erytyematosus, an incurable blood disease she had been diagnosed with. Two years before the publication of her first novel, when she discovered she was suffering from the blood disease, she moved, with her mother, back to the family home in Milledgeville (http://kirjasto.sci.fi/flannery.htm).
During her short life she authored two short novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960). In addition, she authored thirty-one short stories published
in two separate anthologies, A Good Man Is Hard To Find and Other Stories (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965). O’Connor also wrote book reviews, largely for the Catholic press; these are collected in The Presence of Grace
(1983), which was compiled by Leo J. Zuber and edited by Carter W. Martin (Cash 34-38). Although the disease would take her life by the age of 39, O’Connor left a body of work that has influenced the satiric and ironic rendering of American literature in modern writing and contributed to the continuation of the realist and naturalist genres in...