Flannery O’Connor

A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories

O’Connor was born in Savannah in 1925 and raised a Catholic. Her father died of lupus; her mother ran a dairy farm in Milledgeville, Georgia. Flannery was a wild, brilliant only child. When she was five, she taught a pet chicken to walk backward.

From “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” in Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works:

“The boy’s look was irritated but dogged. ‘I don’t care,’ he said. “I don’t care a thing about what all you done. I just want to know if you love me or don’tcher?’ and he caught her to him and wildly planted her face with kisses until she said, ‘Yes, yes.’”

After college, she enrolled in the then-new Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and in 1950 she became ill with lupus and moved back to her mother’s farm. Many of her stories, in particular, are considered powerful tragicomic masterpieces of the Southern Gothic tradition. O’Connor was eccentric herself; she put Coca-Cola in her coffee and once gave her mother a mule for Mother’s Day.

She had many friends, but her only romance was a brief liaison (exactly one kiss) with a textbook salesman; she also had a long-distance friendship with a fan, a lonely lesbian woman with whom she exchanged more than 300 letters.

Later in life, her mother took her to Lourdes, hoping Flannery’s lupus would be cured. It was not. Close to death at age thirty-nine, when asked if she heard the celestial choir, she said yes, but it was singing “Clementine.”

O’Connor wrote little, but her life was so short and her health so broken that her output is actually amazing: thirty-one stories, two novels, and hundreds of entertaining letters.

ALSO RECOMMENDED:

Everything That Rises Must Converge. A collection of short stories published posthumously in 1965. The title story was awarded the O. Henry Prize in short fiction in 1963, the second of three O. Henry Prizes received by O’Connor.

Salted Caramel & Bourbon Milk Shake

In the short story, “Wise Blood,” Enoch drinks a chocolate malted milk shake whilst making suggestive remarks to the waitress whom he believes to be in love with him.

3 big scoops vanilla ice cream

2 oz. bourbon

1/3 cup caramel sauce, plus 2 tbsp. for garnish

1 cup milk

½ tsp. salt

Ice cubes

Place milk, salt, caramel sauce, and ice in a blender and pulse to combine, until frothy. Add ice cream and bourbon and pulse until incorporated. Pour into a serving glass and top with remaining caramel sauce. Serves 1.