In Milledgeville (mostly a college town now, but in Flannery’s time the site of one of the world’s largest insane asylums) you’d be amazed how few “old timers” don’t know her. There are also a lot who do remember her but are still pissed that she fictionalized them or one of their friends/relatives.
Ironically, one of the bloodiest and weirdest things to happen in M’ville wasn’t recorded by Flannery in her stories, but it did become the novel/movie Paris Trout, a work of fiction that is far more true to the actual events that inspired it than most “based on a true story” movies. (If interested in googling, the real Paris Trout was Marion Stembridge; he was so paranoid he kept his urine in a safe, ate only canned foods, had a sheet of lead under his bed and sheets of glass on his floor to make sure nobody shot him from below or snuck up on him, and he chose the fireworks celebration of the city’s Sesquicentennial Parade to murder his lawyers so that nobody would recognize the sound of gunfire.)
Um, hypothetically, if you knew a person who isn’t sure if [del]she’s[/del] they’ve read Flannery O’Conner, what specific works would you recommend for them?
I don’t see whats so strange about an English teacher not being familiar with the work of one particular writer. Teachers today aren’t the all knowing souls they used to be- sad state of affairs, to be sure, but not surprising.
I know who O’Connor is, and I’ve read some of her stories, but I can’t make head nor tail of any of it. All I know is that, whatever’s going on, it’s going to end badly, and it’ll have something to do with sin. So I don’t think I’m all that much ahead of your colleague.
I’ve read a couple of Flannery O’connor short story collections. Maybe because I’m not Southern, I wasn’t all that impressed. Her work is probably better appreciated if you spring from the same roots she did and her work evokes people and places that you personally know.
It’s also worth noting that this is a middle school teacher. This would be more egregious if she were teaching college-level courses, but her focus is on teaching spelling and grammar, not literature. I don’t see a great tragedy in her ignorance of a minor author, or of an equally minor literary sub-genre.
I’d probably start with A Good Man is Hard to Find (full-text) since it’s her best known. (Frankly, while I appreciate her work and think she was tremendously talented, she’s not on my short list of favorite writers [except in the specific SoGoth subdivision]; very religious, somewhat judgmental, and very little sense of humor in her writings [though some of her letters were hysterical].)
It always amazes that every couple of weeks, without fail, there is a thread where someone screams “I can’t believe some person didn’t know who/what X was!”
“Some person” is always someone who shouldn’t expected to know anything about the thing they don’t know about. And “X” is always some obscure person/title/genre that most of the people on this board (which is populated by the smartest people on the Internet!!!1111!!!eleventy!!!) don’t know about.
Turns out I had read it, but I looked around at my library anyway. That story is in a collection with The Artificial Nigger, which also sounds pretty familiar. You’d think you’d remember the gist of a story with a title like that, though.
Hmm… I was a smart and inquisitive kid who liked to read and fancied himself a future poetry and fiction writer, throughout both high school and college, and I never heard of Flannery O’Connor until my first year of Grad School in a Philosophy program. (A fellow grad student had tattooed a quote on her arm–IIRC it was the one that goes something like “Compassion is the first step toward the gas chambers.”)
Turns out my best friend in High School was a big fan of her work. For all I know she even mentioned her to me a couple of times, but it never “took.”
Anyway, just saying, it doesn’t seem so hard to me to think a person could miss out on O’Connor (and in fact I myself still have never read anything by her) and not necessarily be a dunce.
-FrL-
(My wife just read a couple of novels by Faulkner and loved them. I have a vague notion that Faulkner and O’Connor might sort of “go together” in a sense. Is that correct? (No head asploding please.) Should I recommend O’Connor to my wife?)
Very little sense of humor? Wow. Another demonstration of the subjectivity of such things. I think she’s one of the funniest writers I can think of. She’s David Sedaris’s single greatest influence, and I can’t read either one without thinking of the other.
And while I’m an atheist, there’s a great deal that resonates for me in her religiosity. I don’t see how you can read her letters and call her judgmental; she was anything but. Again, the strangeness of subjectivity to such things never ceases to amaze me around here.
Definitely. No guaranteeing that what she likes in Faulkner she’ll find in O’Connor; O’Connor is much more of a comic writer, although absurdist might be a better word. As an O’Connor fan, I find Faulkner a bit self-serious and melodramatic by comparison; your wife might find O’Connor too, well, absurd. Still I’d recommend she giver her a go.