Flannery O'Connor Collected Works

Resumen del libro

In her short lifetime, Flannery O'Connor became one of the most distinctive American writers of the twentieth century. By birth a native of Georgia and a Roman Catholic, O'Connor depicts, in all its comic and horrendous incongruity, the limits of worldly wisdom and the mysteries of divine grace in the Christ-haunted Protestant South. This Library of America collection, the most comprehensive ever published, contains all of her novels and short-story collections, as well as nine other stories, eight of her most important essays, and a selection of 259 witty, spirited, and revealing letters, twenty-one published here for the first time.

Her fiction brilliantly explores the human obsession with seemingly banal things. It might be a new hat or clean hogs or, for Hazel Motes, hero of Wise Blood (1952), an automobile. Nobody with a good car needs to be justified, Hazel assures himself while using its hood for a pulpit to preach his Church Without Christ. As in O'Connor's subsequent work, the characters in this novel are driven to violence, even murder, and their strong vernacular endows them with the discomforting reality of next-door neighbors. In order to recognize a freak, she remarks in one of her essays, you have to have a conception of the whole man.

In the title story of her first, dazzling collection of stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955), the old grandmother discovers the comic irrelevance of good manners when she and her family meet up with the sinister Misfit, who claims there is no pleasure but meanness. The terror of urban dislocation in The Artificial Nigger, the bizarre baptism in The River, or one-legged Hulga Hopewell's encounter with a Bible salesman in Good Country People these startling events give readers the uneasy sense of mysteries about to be revealed.

Her second novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960), casts the shadow of the Old Testament across a landscape of backwoods shacks, modern towns, and empty highways. Caught between the prophetic fury of his great-uncle and the unrelenting rationalism of his uncle, fourteen-year-old Francis Tarwater undergoes a terrifying trial of faith when he is commanded to baptize his idiot cousin.

The nine stories in Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) show O'Connor's powers at their height. The title story is a terrifying, heart-rending drama of familial and racial misunderstanding. Revelation and The Enduring Chill probe further into conflicts between parental figures and recalcitrant offspring, where as much tension is generated from quiet conversation as from the physical violence of gangsters and fanatics.

Biografía del autor

x{0026}lt;P x{0026}lt;B Flannery O'Connorx{0026}lt;/B nació en Savannah, Georgia, en 1925, hija única de una acomodada familia sureña de ascendencia irlandesa. Siendo todavía muy joven, sus padres trasladaron su residencia a Milledgeville, donde su madre poseía una casa y una granja. La futura escritora siguió estudios universitarios en el Georgia State College for Women y en 1945 se licenció en Ciencias Sociales. Uno de sus profesores le procuró una beca para la Universidad de Iowa, donde siguió un curso de creación literaria bajo la dirección de Paul Engle. Aunque su primer relato vio la luz en 1952, la revelación literaria de Flannery O'Connor se produjo en 1952 con la aparición de su novela x{0026}lt;I Wise Bloodx{0026}lt;/I , años más tarde adaptada al cine por John Huston. Aquejada desde 1951 de una grave enfermedad en la sangre, que le afectó los huesos de las piernas y le obligó a andar con muletas, la escritora pasó los trece últimos años de su vida en la granja familiar de Milledgeville, dedicada a la creación literaria y a la cría de pavos reales. La publicación de su magnífico libro de relatos x{0026}lt;I A Good Man is Hard to Findx{0026}lt;/I (1955) y de su segunda novela, x{0026}lt;I The Violent Bear it Awayx{0026}lt;/I (1960), cimentaron su prestigio como una de las narradoras norteamericanas más vigorosas y originales de su generación. Consumida por la enfermedad incurable que la aquejaba, Flannery O'Connor, demócrata y católica, cuyo humor atormentado y sombrío la llevó a describir como nadie el primitivismo religioso del Sur bíblico y protestante, falleció el 3 de agosto de 1964, a los treinta y nueve años. La aparición póstuma de su libro de relatos x{0026}lt;I Everything that Rises Must Convergex{0026}lt;/I (1965) representó la consagración definitiva de su prodigioso talento narrativo.x{0026}lt;/P