Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O’Connor was a Georgia Catholic who lived with her mother on a dairy farm, raised peacocks, and died of lupus at thirty-nine, having written two novels and thirty-one stories set among the Protestant South’s preachers, prophets, drifters and self-satisfied, all met by a violent grace they do not want. A Good Man Is Hard to Find, in which a family on a road trip meets the escaped convict called the Misfit, is the story the lists assign and the one that shows her method: the comedy of manners ending in a shooting that is also a revelation. Her letters and lectures explain what she was doing for readers who missed it.