critical essays on flannery o'connor

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Analysis of Flannery O’Connor’s Good Country People

Analysis of Flannery O’Connor’s Good Country People

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 25, 2021

In a memorable contribution to her stories that use the grotesque , Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People” ironically reverses the old saying that country people are good and its corollary, simple. Set in Georgia, the story features three women and a Bible salesman.

As in most of O’Connor’s stories, the unselfconscious third-person narrator injects comic overtones or, more accurately, those of black humor, to entertain readers as they become acquainted with these markedly peculiar characters. Mrs. Hopewell, the initiator of the “good country people” idea, speaks in clichés equivalent to “Have a good day.” Her foil is her maid, Mrs. Freeman, who, in her fascination with all forms of sickness, disease, and abnormality, tells revolting tales about her daughters (Glynese and Carramae) and exhibits a perverse fascination with Mrs. Hopewell’s large, hulking, 32-yearold daughter, Joy. Joy had lost her leg at age 10; she lumbers and stumps around on a wooden one and has changed her name to Hulga . Joy-Hulga brags to the two older women about her doctorate in philosophy, boasting that she believes in nothing at all.

Philip Roth/The New Yorker

When Manley Pointer arrives on the scene with his Bibles and his humorously phallic name, the reader expects that Hulga will exert her strong will on him and seduce him. But he has only been playing the part of a simple, good country person, and his briefcase contains a false bottom under which he keeps liquor, condoms, and items he steals from women with deformities. He has, he informs Hulga as he runs off with her wooden leg, believed in nothing since birth. Hulga, for all her degrees and pride in her intellectual power, has been played for a fool, losing not her virginity but her carefully cultivated outward sense of superiority to others less educated. As Ann Charters points out, “However dastardly Pointer’s actions, he forces Hulga to feel and acknowledge her emotions for the first time,” and our final impression is that Hulga may learn from this humbling experience, becoming “less presumptuous and closer to psychic wholeness” (136). Hulga and her mother must correct and surmount their complacency and naïveté, for the story suggests that without a strong philosophy and spiritual beliefs, they remain at the mercy of the Manley Pointers and Mrs. Freemans, significantly connected through their similar names, who also believe in nothing but have less difficulty surviving.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Charters, Ann. Resources for Teaching: Major Writers of Short Fiction. Boston: Bedford Books/St. Martin’s, 1993. O’Connor, Flannery. “Good Country People.” In Contemporary American Literature, edited by George Perkins and Barbara Perkins. New York: Random House, 1988.

Share this:

Categories: Literature , Short Story

Tags: American Literature , Analysis of Flannery O'Connor’s Good Country People , criticism of Flannery O'Connor’s Good Country People , essays of Flannery O'Connor’s Good Country People , Flannery O'Connor’s Good Country People , Flannery O'Connor’s Good Country People appreciation , Flannery O'Connor’s Good Country People guide , Flannery O'Connor’s Good Country People notes , Flannery O'Connor’s Good Country People plot , Flannery O'Connor’s Good Country People structure , Flannery O'Connor’s Good Country People themes , Flannery O’Connor , guide of Flannery O'Connor’s Good Country People , Literary Criticism , notes of Flannery O'Connor’s Good Country People , plot of Flannery O'Connor’s Good Country People , structure of Flannery O'Connor’s Good Country People , summay of Flannery O'Connor’s Good Country People , themes of Flannery O'Connor’s Good Country People

Related Articles

You must be logged in to post a comment.

• Subscriber Login

Since 1900, the Christian Century has published reporting, commentary, poetry, and essays on the role of faith in a pluralistic society.

© 2023 The Christian Century.

Contact Us     Privacy Policy

Flannery O’Connor’s challenge to the Lost Cause myths of the Confederacy

A little-known o’connor story explores the human cost of self-deception..

Imagine that you or someone you know participated in or in some way enabled a horrific act of sustained brutality and that, in order to erase the memory of these misdeeds, you then attempted to convince others that what was done was in fact a heroic defense of a noble ideal. Imagine the extent you would go to in order to convince others that what you fought for was not a reason for penitence but rather a cause that God would vindicate. Imagine that this historical erasure was so thorough that many people came to believe your cause was morally pure. And imagine that you then built monuments to your self-deception and were able to convince others that these monuments were now a sacred part of the landscape of the very same nation that you sought to extricate yourself from.

This, arguably, is the logic behind the Lost Cause and its many monuments to the Confederacy—totems of a 150-year campaign to historically reimagine the meaning of the Civil War. The years from 1890 to 1920 marked the high point of this campaign, led by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and other groups which today protest “heritage violations” of their ongoing program of public commemoration. And they have not lost: Confederate revisionism, in the soft form of preservationism, as opposed to the blunt-force tactics of rallies and protests, is now the provenance of local, state, and even federal governments.

Two weeks after the Confederate battle flag was removed from statehouse grounds in Columbia, South Carolina, in July 2015, the North Carolina General Assembly passed a law protecting “monuments and memorials commemorating events, persons, and military service in North Carolina history.” Despite the apparent catholicity of its protections, the Cultural History Artifact Management and Patriotism Act was clearly aimed at granting asylum to Confederate monuments and memorials around the state, based on the notion that, as its proponents argued, to remove them from courthouse lawns and university quadrangles would be to “erase history.” The flag episode in Columbia was a catalyst for a storm of neo-Confederate protest, which intensified during the 2016 election cycle and came to a head at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. The sharp reaction against the Charlottesville rally did not mean that all was lost for the Lost Cause. Far from it.

In December 2018, the Smithsonian Institution found that taxpayers had contributed over $40 million to the preservations of Confederate sites. The Department of Veterans Affairs, a federal agency, spends millions of dollars each year in order to secure Confederate cemeteries in Virginia, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency contributes thousands for “protective measures” for Jefferson Davis’s former home in Biloxi, Mississippi.

Federal curacy of Confederate burial grounds is not a new phenomenon: it goes back at least to 1900, when a couple hundred Confederate soldiers were reinterred in Arlington National Cemetery. Within 15 years, President Woodrow Wilson was at the site to dedicate a monument to the Con­federate dead, confident the nation was ready to put behind it the “fraternal misunderstandings” that led to war. By the end of World War I, the specious history of the Lost Cause had become a popular fiction serviceable for advancing the military and political interests of white Americans both at home and overseas. A hundred years later, the federal government would be paying to protect memorials to honor people it had once regarded as treasonous. It was a stunning if slow-moving turnabout: a version of history that could objectively be called white supremacist propaganda now has legal protection from the government against whose authority the patrons of that mythology originally revolted.

Propping up an illusory history has a price, and not just on balance sheets. The human cost of such self-deception is the subject of an early and little-known story by Flannery O’Connor, “A Late Encounter with the Enemy.” Originally published in Harper’s Bazaar in 1953 and included in A Good Man Is Hard to Find two years later, the story is about the ways in which the burdens of history, when honestly confronted, can bring not enlightenment but devastation.

“Late Encounter” is barely ten pages in the Library of America edition. It is hardly one of her major works (O’Connor described it as “not so bad”), and it rarely figures in critical studies of her work. But it is notable for being the only piece of her fiction that directly treats the Civil War and its legacy. The story is only superficially about the war, though; it is really about the way in which the war is—or is not—remembered. It is a story about memory and the deep conflict between public commemoration, sectarian mythology, and historical reality.

“Late Encounter” is structurally simple: there is a single main scene framing one flashback. Sally Poker Sash is about to attend her college graduation, the joyful fruit of a protracted education spread out over 20 summers while she was teaching school. It’s such a big deal that she has invited her 104-year-old grandfather, a Confederate veteran, to attend in full military dress. Sally arranges for him to sit up on stage—not so that he will have a good view of the proceedings but because she wants him to be seen: “she wanted to show what she stood for, or, as she said, ‘what all was behind her,’ and was not behind them. This them was not anybody in particular. It was just all the upstarts who had turned the world on its head and unsettled the ways of decent living.” She wants the crowd to see him, and herself through him—“Glorious upright old man stand-in for the old traditions! Dignity! Honor! Courage!”—as a rebuke to their wanton ways.

It’s not hard to hear in this passage the ways in which O’Connor herself wrestled with the tension between the traditions of white Southern society and the expanding movement for rights for African Americans. O’Connor was hardly a radical integrationist and was not innocent of racist prejudice. She was often condescending toward blacks and—in 1952 at least—could not honestly be called a diligent student of racial equality and the traditions of African American literature.

On the other hand, her work often gestures beyond the narrow racial imaginary of Georgia in the 1950s, and at its most cutting and poignant it ruthlessly undermines the heritage of white supremacy and the mythologies that support it. Her most powerful stories, such as “Revelation,” include a radical vision of the kingdom of God and a savage and hilarious mockery of white pieties.

“Late Encounter” is one of these stories. It offers a brief but profound meditation on the debilitating nature of selective memory, the personal and public costs of self-serving falsehoods, and in­difference to the past. This indifference is concentrated into “five feet four inches of pure game cock,” General Tennessee Flintlock Sash of the Confederacy. Sally Sash is aware that her grandfather had not actually been a general at all. The general himself neither knows nor cares what he is or was: “He had probably been a foot soldier; he didn’t remember what he had been; in fact, he didn’t remember that war at all.” The memory of the war is like a dead appendage that does and does not belong to him:

It was like his feet, which hung down now shriveled at the very end of him, without feeling, covered with a blue-gray afghan that Sally Poker had crocheted when she was a little girl. He didn’t remember the Spanish-American War in which he had lost a son; he didn’t even remember the son. He didn’t have any use for history because he never expected to meet it again. To his mind, history was connected with processions and life with parades and he liked parades.

General Sash prefers “parades with floats full of Miss Americas and Miss Daytona Beaches and Miss Queen Cotton Products” to processions, especially “dreary black” ones with their interminable obsession with the past.

The only episode from the past that General Sash bothers to hang on to is “that preemy they had in Atlanta” 12 years earlier, when he was first given the general’s uniform. The event alluded to is the official premiere of Gone with the Wind in Atlanta on December 15, 1939, attended by Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh, and a starstruck Margaret Mitchell. Seated next to glammed-up Hollywood stars and starlets that night, the Atlanta Constitution reported, were four men in their nineties “in freshly pressed, be-medalled grey uniforms. They sat alone, huddled in companionable silence, lost in thoughts brought back sharply by the raw scenes of a ravished Georgia countryside.”

O’Connor makes the scene even more theatrical: before the picture, General Sash is trotted out before the gala audience, a Hollywood “gul” on each arm. In describing the way Sash is “lent” to the city museum every Confederate Memorial Day, O’Connor’s language is cinematic: Sash is like a stage prop intended to “lend atmosphere to the scene.” Sash is a totem of public memory, drained of life to the degree to which he is indifferent to the past.

As O’Connor tells it, when General Sash made his en­trance into the theater, members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy began to clap, and later they “rose as a group and did not sit down again until the general was on the stage.” O’Connor is slyly mocking the overtly religious groupthink of the UDC, which acts almost automatically, as if with a single mind. When his moment has passed, the general is whisked off stage and back to his seat, where he sleeps through the entire movie.

On the stage for his granddaughter’s graduation, the general is in a different mood. He is attended to by Sally’s nephew, John Wesley Poker Sash—“a fat blond boy of ten with an executive expression”—and they make quite a pair, the general in his “courageous gray” and the “clean” young blond boy in his Scout khakis. The neutral colors of white Southern memory—blond, grey, khaki—are bland, flat, and dull but loaded with historical symbolism: a visual convergence of the grey of Confederate soldiers and the tan of Nazi brownshirts. Together they are threatened by the “black procession” that winds its way across the campus and into the auditorium. It is a reprise of the movie premiere a dozen years earlier, but this time the scene is framed not in terms of entertainment but of education: “The graduates in their heavy robes looked as if the last beads of ignorance were being sweated out of them.”

O’Connor repeats the word black over and over again as General Sash sits on the stage watching the black procession relentlessly pressing toward him and forming a “black pool” in front of him. The general has the sensation of a tiny hole opening up in his skull and of knowledge being poured into it against his will. At the beginning of the ceremony itself, a “black figure” begins “telling something about history and the General made up his mind he wouldn’t listen, but the words kept seeping through the little hole in his head.”

The words come on all the same, bearing down on and into Sash. He tries to resist. “He had forgotten history and he didn’t intend to remember it. He had forgotten the name and face of his wife and the names and faces of his children or even if he had a wife and children, and he had forgotten the names of places and the places themselves and what had happened at them.”

Along with the “slow black music” of the graduation ceremony, names keep coming in a relentless march: Chickamauga, Shiloh, Johnston, Lee. General Sash tries to shore himself against the onslaught of historical particularity by summoning up again the memory of the premiere in Atlanta, the city that for O’Connor represents fake history, collective memory as processed by Disney and Hollywood. Like the black procession itself, the words continue to press toward him.

“Dammit!” he thinks to himself, “I ain’t going to have it!“ Against the encroaching tidal wave of blackness—the “figure in the black robe,” the “black pool in front of him,” the “black slow music”—the artificiality of Sash’s memory begins frantically to retreat, then to yield. The unacknowledged hellhound on his trail, the reality of history begins to crash upon him: “He recognized it, for it had been dogging all his days. He made such a desperate effort to see over it and find out what comes after the past that his hand clenched the sword until the blade touched bone.”

Ultimately the contest in “Late Encounter” is between the soothing, mythologized version of history we wish to remember and the ugly reality that we cannot ignore. The general’s recognition of his own complicity in real history—and the implicit costs of Lost Cause mythology in contributing to the disfranchisement of African Americans—is overpowering. When Sally crosses the stage she sees her grandfather “sitting fixed and fierce, his eyes wide open.” Historical truth has brought Sash to a kind of new awareness—but it has also cost him his life. Sally mistakes his wide-eyed expression for grandfatherly pride, but in fact it is the death-stare of an existential scouring, a religious encounter with truth’s violent steamrolling of pious falsehood.

Sally Poker is not alone in mistaking an expression of horror for one of adulation. Americans in general have excelled at this sort of category error, and while the Lost Cause represents the most prominent contemporary example of a fake history that still survives under the guise of a story of heroic resistance, the phenomenon is not limited to Lost Causers.

What if history is not at all the way we prefer to remember it? Could it be that monuments—not just public ones but also those our own personal histories are made of—are tokens of a tacit agreement to forget certain difficult truths? Directed both generally at an inveterate human skill for self-deception and specifically at the mythology of the Lost Cause, the question that O’Connor’s “Late Encounter” puts to the reader is both blunt and surgical: What if you are wrong about what it is you think you were fighting for?

A version of this article appears in the print edition under the title “Monuments to a lie.”

Pete Candler

Pete Candler is a writer in Asheville, North Carolina. He is currently working on a book about the American South.

We would love to hear from you. Let us know what you think about this article by writing a letter to the editors .

Most Recent

Choosing to abide (john 6:56-69).

by Katie Hines-Shah

Small creatures

Faith at the expense of freedom, debating the nature of jesus, most popular.

Kamala Harris’s interfaith identity could help her win the election

The roots of Hebrew Roots

Five faith facts about Trump's VP pick, JD Vance

August 25, ordinary 21b ( ephesians 6:10–20).

• Literature & Fiction
• History & Criticism

Sorry, there was a problem.

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Image Unavailable

• To view this video download Flash Player

Critical Essays on Flannery O'Connor (Critical Essays on American Literature) Hardcover – July 1, 1985

• Print length 227 pages
• Language English
• Publisher G K Hall
• Publication date July 1, 1985
• Dimensions 6.5 x 0.75 x 9.75 inches
• ISBN-10 0816186936
• ISBN-13 978-0816186938
• See all details

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ G K Hall; large type edition (July 1, 1985)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 227 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0816186936
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0816186938
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.15 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 0.75 x 9.75 inches

Customer reviews

• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 5 star 100% 0% 0% 0% 0% 100%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 4 star 100% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 3 star 100% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 2 star 100% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 1 star 100% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0%

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top review from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

• About Amazon
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Sell products on Amazon
• Sell on Amazon Business
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Become an Affiliate
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Host an Amazon Hub
• › See More Make Money with Us
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Amazon and COVID-19
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices

• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
• Your Ads Privacy Choices

", Katarzyna Nowak examines how human disfigurements accumulate meaning in "Good Country People" and "Parker's Back".   ", Timothy McGrath compares the different presentations of the American landscape in Alfred Kazin's and Flannery O'Connor's . , David Allen Cook uses O'Connor's short stories and to show that violence is simply the admission price religious pretenders must pay to discover Truth. ", in which she discusses one of the most common complaints about O'Connor's work. , our friend from New Zealand, has been kind enough to share his work with so that other readers can consider his thoughts on the theological implications of O'Connor's fiction. " attempts to find the boundary between evil and mental illness through an analysis of the characters in " ". ", an essay on O'Connor's favorite story " ". " and considers the implications of O'Connor's own encounter with disease in his essay " ". ", Stephen Sparrow considers the impact of Fortune's avarice in " ". " seeks an answer to O'Connor's question through her short story " ". " Stephen Sparrow searches for this place amongst the pages of O'Connor's story " ". ". ", and the punch line involves the theft of more than just the aforementioned wooden leg. Want to know what Hulga Hopewell really looses? Then check out Stephen Sparrow's " ". ". " offers an analysis of . '." " deciphers the loaded language O'Connor employs in . , Stephen Sparrow examines " " for proof that O'Connor could see that spark, and she believed that God could also.  ", explores the interaction of pride and hope in . ", Stephen Sparrow's look at pride in the story . " examines how O'Connor wields her "grotesque" characters to grant us insight into our personal characters. " and delve into the literal and figural importance of sight in . See how O'Connor weaves religious vision and free will into a story about a man wearing a blue suit and a black, broad-brimmed hat. and the necessity of virtue in " ". ".   ". " to answer this question in her essay " ". , so we encourage our audience to visit O'Connor's home and experience firsthand what it's like to step into the world of an O'Connor story. ".  ". . has received correspondence regarding the validity of opinions about O'Connor's religious and racial views. Some of these exchanges have been productive and resulted in an , while others have simply expressed personal affront. The administrators at read all correspondence and welcome critical rebuttal, which at times we will publish on-site, however is not a forum for material that deals solely with race, religion or politics unconnected with O'Connor and her work. If you take personal offense from the opinion (correct or incorrect) of any of our contributors, we will gladly forward your communications and allow you to discuss the matter directly. " to get Nelson's take on how the meaning of vision has evolved over time, how that connects biological vs. mechanical means of sight, and how this all connects with O'Connor's work. has an arts and culture article by David Griffith on that looks at O'Connor's story in light of the current cultural bias toward muslim refugees. " a presentation honoring the 50th anniversary of O'Connor's death. Sessions talks with Angela Alaimo O'Donnell, discussing O'Connor's life and work, as well as a short Q&A with the audience where Dr. Sessions reminisces about a long-gone Georgia of the mid-twentieth century, and where O'Connor fitted into that cultural landscape. ". that includes interviews with Ralph Wood, Brad Gooch, Bruce Gentry and people influenced by O'Connor's work. . Their goal is to tell the story of O'Connor's legacy in light of the social justice issues prevalent today--sustainability, diversity, poverty, LGBT rights, and animal rights. This means her story can be used as a platform for telling news. The documentary begins with O'Connor's farm and the two women working to save it, Elizabeth and April, both lifelong Flannery fans doing their own work to preserve her legacy. in her rural dreams. Be sure to read the rest of to get a glimpse of her urban life. "examines the reality of O'Connor's southern identity reflected in her fiction, particulalry "Good Country People". , which are collected on Oates' University of San Francisco website for your reading pleasure.  (Thank for informing us about this treasure.) 's October 2010 " " was "The Train" a 1948 short story precursor to . If you haven't read "The Train", do take the time, because it's interesting to see the progression from short story to novel. " discusses the reception of O'Connor's fiction--both by her contemporaries and by today's readers--touching on controversies such as racism in the south. podcast, ( , , ) shares his admiration for and frustration with O’Connor, discussing her vision and genius found in "Good Country People", "Everything that Rises Must Converge" and "Revelation". , where Michael Fitzgerald (son of Sally and Robert Fitzgerald) gave a presentation on O'Connor. The conference has already concluded, but it's worth mentioning the increasing international recognition given to O'Connor. ", tracing the development of novels during this time, the relationship between writers and readers, fiction's engagement with history, and the changing place of literature in American culture. It's a fantastic course, but you may be particularly interested in her lectures on . Hungerford excerpts O'Connor's letters for a critical framework of O'Connor's Catholicism, then delves into vision in relation to both O'Connor's characters and her readers. In the second lecture Hungerford explores the southern social context of the novel and the New Critical writing program of which O'Connor was a product.   " Gretchen Dobrott Bernard considers the ramifications of written exchange as reflected in the friendships O'Connor cultivated with Maryat Lee and Betty Hester. from a publisher's perspective. . opinion piece " " takes a long look at the power of creative genius as approached by Aristotle, Wilde, Eliot, and as exemplified by O'Connor. , a Christian publication that spotlighted O'Connor back in 1994/1995. If you plan to cite these articles, you should probably send an e-mail, or call the magazine to find out volume and page numbers. (Sojourners requires a free registration to read the articles.) . Danny Duncan Collum. Alice Walker. . Julie Polter. . Shane Helmer. . David S. Cunningham. (or, Flannery O'Connor and those other guys) with me, and I think it's a marvelous place. In Nina's own words, the page focuses on the "Catholic 'analogical' perspective of writers such as Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Graham Greene, Walker Percy and G.K. Chesterton, with a little Albert Camus thrown in for some atheistic spice." contains a chapter on "Transcendence Through Transgression and Kenosis: Sin as Salvation and Self-Emptying in Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood." The O'Connor analysis stands on its own, but treat yourself and read the whole text. analyzes some of the elements that make O'Connor's short fiction so special. . I located some excellent articles on O'Connor and her writing. Ronald Weber takes a look at the importance of O'Connor's religious faith in her writing in this bio-critical essay. J. Bottom points out the irony of a bishop banning O'Connor from a Catholic school and uses it as a springboard for an exploration of what Catholicism means in the 21st century. Amy Welborn searches for O'Connor's resting place in the heart of Georgia, and finds much more than a gravesite. (or film majors who get a kick out of scrutinizing literature) stop by Pamela Demory's site for a comparison of text and cinema. and . I love the title too: Be sure to take a stroll through the rest of his site, as he offers a veritable cornucopia of Literature and Writing resources. --> has written an interesting paper on . which examines the symbology of Hazel Motes' Essex. You'll find the paper at the bottom of the page as "Essex". '); // End --> Home Page | O'Connor Biography | Online Articles | Offline Articles | Other O'Connor Sites | About the Site Advertisement Anatomy of a cover: the complete works of flannery o’connor. The art and life of Mark di Suvero At the time of her death, at age thirty-nine, Flannery O’Connor had published only two novels, thirty-one short stories, and a small book’s worth of literary criticism and critical essays. “In most English classes,” she once wrote, “the short story has become a kind of literary specimen to be dissected.” O’Connor, of course, was referring to her readers experiencing the work, not picking it apart in a writers’ workshop. That same principle drove Charlotte Strick and June Glasson in their recent redesign of the covers of O’Connor’s five books. Strick, the former art director of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and current coprinciple of the design firm Strick&Williams (as well as the art editor of The Paris Review ), approached Glasson, an illustrator, about the project in 2013. Four of the five redesigned jackets have been released, with the last coming next month. Glasson and Strick met through happenstance—a journey that began at a doctor’s office. “Years ago,” Strick says, “while absentmindedly flipping through a magazine in my doctor’s waiting room, I serendipitously stumbled upon a piece about June. I thought her work had a strange, seductive and unique beauty all its own.” In 2012, Strick commissioned Glasson to create illustrations to accompany an essay by author Rich Cohen about French-American pirate Jean Lafitte and 1800s piracy in New Orleans, which appeared in The Paris Review no. 201 . This collaboration triggered Strick’s art-director instinct, and she returned to Glasson when it came time to reenvision O’Connor’s works. “June is capable of imbuing her paintings with a curious maleficence,” Strick told me. “She seemed up for the task of tackling O’Connor.” Book jackets are a more complicated affair, however, and require, as Strick says, “a grand leap of faith.” “Choosing the right designer or artist for a project is purely instinctual,” she explained. “If you believe they can do it, and you sense their mutual excitement for the assignment, then it’s up to you to guide them toward the vision you have for the project. That’s what makes for the best work. With the O’Connor, I never doubted my choice of Glasson. When it turned out that she was also a real O’Connor fan, I knew for certain we had the right artist on the job.” “I remember the stories vividly,” Glasson recalls, “especially ‘A Good Man is Hard To Find’ and ‘Good Country People.’ They’re dark, absurd, and comic, and bring her characters to such vivid life. I remember, in particular, the prosthetic-leg-stealing bible salesman from ‘Good Country People.’ ” O’Connor—and Carson McCullers before her—was a keen practitioner of the Southern grotesque, which she dosed with tales about faith and religion. “Flannery’s characters occupy these dark Southern worlds,” Glasson says. “She vividly portrays the spaces and landscapes her characters occupy. Visually, I think I imagined a dark hazy landscape, not an overly romantic Southern one, but one that is slightly off, faded, decaying, one that I’ve glimpsed on road trips through the South.” “I knew right away what medium I wanted to use,” she adds. “I work a lot in inks and watercolors, and I knew that I wanted to try to use the loose, washy nature of the medium to capture the mood of her work.” As a jumping-off point, Strick sent Glasson a copy of Milton Glaser’s famous Wise Blood paperback cover from the sixties. This served as a brainstorming exercise, and the inspiration for her entire catalog, starting with the award-winning Complete Stories collection. “One afternoon,” Strick says, “Sean McDonald [executive editor at FSG] showed up in my office door clutching a 1971 edition of O’Connor’s Complete Stories with a jacket by Charles Skaggs. We knew that Glasson should also contemporize this vintage cover as well—while still keeping the hypnotic, sooty Glaser  Wise Blood jacket in mind. In the process of re-creating The Complete Stories in June’s own style, she and I saw how it could influence the others to come. We began sending one another ideas for other organic ‘frames’ that would be original to each title. This provided a template of sorts for four out of five of the covers.” “Once we had figured out The Complete Stories ,” Glasson continues, “we had an idea of how we wanted the other covers to look. For  Everything That Rises Must Converge and The Violent Bear It Away , we discussed previous covers, and the books themselves.” “June and I worked on and off on these designs for most of a year,” Strick says. “Every few months, between other projects, I’d reach out to her for more sketches. Our ideas for imagery tended to align. She was tireless, sending me scan after scan of inked studies and paintings.” “For Mystery and Manners ,” Glasson explains, “we riffed off the concept of the snake and fruit. I’d whip out some sketches and send them to Charlotte. She would send feedback and I’d tweak things or try something entirely new. During this period, we went back and forth a lot, and I did a lot of unsuccessful sketches—more than a hundred and fifty—but eventually we hit on the right concept, layout, and style that would stand on its own and complement the other covers.” “And finally, for Wise Blood ,” Glasson says, “we knew we wanted to pay homage to Milton Glaser’s cover from the 1960s.” “McDonald and I,” Strick explains, “were both enamored of Milton Glaser’s 1967 FSG book jacket for O’Connor’s first novel. The style of Glaser’s sooty cover portrait reminded me so much of the way Glasson is able to control both form and mood with her colored ink washes. I felt sure she could achieve a similar stylistic result—while bringing her own voice to these covers.” “Each of the final covers represents the compilation of multiple paintings,” Strick explains, “with me taking the best crows from one, the perfect flames or feathers from another—and then layering them digitally together in my Manhattan office in the same way that June works with a paintbrush on paper in her art studio in Laramie, Wyoming. June is primarily a fine artist, so I am grateful that she was open to working so collaboratively with me on this commercial project—allowing me to shape and reshape her paintings in this way. “And lucky for me, she also has award-winning handwriting. After months of madly trying to marry different digital typefaces with these paintings, I thought to ask her to try painting the titles herself. Her loose, irregular letterforms ultimately make these covers so much more distinctive and really tie the five titles together.” J. C. Gabel is a writer, editor, and publisher living in Los Angeles. We’re fighting to restore access to 500,000+ books in court this week. Join us! Send me an email reminder By submitting, you agree to receive donor-related emails from the Internet Archive. Your privacy is important to us. We do not sell or trade your information with anyone. Internet Archive Audio This Just In Grateful Dead Old Time Radio 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings Audio Books & Poetry Computers, Technology and Science Music, Arts & Culture News & Public Affairs Spirituality & Religion Radio News Archive Flickr Commons Occupy Wall Street Flickr NASA Images Solar System Collection Ames Research Center All Software Old School Emulation MS-DOS Games Historical Software Classic PC Games Software Library Kodi Archive and Support File Vintage Software CD-ROM Software CD-ROM Software Library Software Sites Tucows Software Library Shareware CD-ROMs Software Capsules Compilation CD-ROM Images ZX Spectrum DOOM Level CD Smithsonian Libraries FEDLINK (US) Lincoln Collection American Libraries Canadian Libraries Universal Library Project Gutenberg Children's Library Biodiversity Heritage Library Books by Language Additional Collections Prelinger Archives Democracy Now! Occupy Wall Street TV NSA Clip Library Animation & Cartoons Arts & Music Computers & Technology Cultural & Academic Films Ephemeral Films Sports Videos Videogame Videos Youth Media Search the history of over 866 billion web pages on the Internet. Mobile Apps Wayback Machine (iOS) Wayback Machine (Android) Browser Extensions Archive-it subscription. Explore the Collections Build Collections Save Page Now Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future. Please enter a valid web address Donate Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Flannery O'Connor; a critical essay Bookreader item preview, share or embed this item, flag this item for. Graphic Violence Explicit Sexual Content Hate Speech Misinformation/Disinformation Marketing/Phishing/Advertising Misleading/Inaccurate/Missing Metadata plus-circle Add Review comment Reviews 27 Previews DOWNLOAD OPTIONS No suitable files to display here. PDF access not available for this item. IN COLLECTIONS Uploaded by station09.cebu on March 19, 2021 SIMILAR ITEMS (based on metadata) Unlimited Users & Remote Access Included Instant Online Activation When You Order Critical Insights: Flannery O'Connor Tags: 1 Volume 360 Pages Essays Offering Analysis by Top Literary Scholars Complete List of Author's Works Chronology of Author's Life Publication Dates of Works Detailed Bio of the Editor General Bibliography General Subject Index This volume is an effort to introduce O'Connor to a new generation of readers by including previously published essays that clarify her religious ideas, her narrative technique, her use of humor, and the regional and social context of her fiction. A chronology of the author's life A complete list of the author's works and their original dates of publication A general bibliography A detailed paragraph on the volume's editor Notes on the individual chapter authors A subject index View a Full List of Literature Titles Additional titles of interest. February 2016 Critical Insights: Short Fiction of Flannery O'Connor As one of the prominent writers of the Southern Gothic genre in the mid-20th Century, Flannery O’Connor used short fiction to explore grotesque characters, Southern settings, questions of morality, and Roman Catholic themes. This volume examines and closely analyzes O’Connor’s best and least-known works, such as “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” Good Country People,” and “Temple of the Holy Ghost.” 297 IMAGES Short Story By Flannery OConnor The First Documentary on Flannery O’Connor Airs on PBS in Milwaukee Critical analysis of Good Country People by Flannery O’ Connor Free Critical Insights: Flannery O'Connor by Charles E. May 📌 Adaptation of Tone Using Flannery O'Connor's Method of Telling a Flannery O'Connor: A Critical Essay: DRAKE, Robert: Amazon.com: Books COMMENTS Flannery O'Connor Critical Essays Essays and criticism on Flannery O'Connor - Critical Essays. an essay titled "Catholic Novelists," O'Connor explained that the Catholic writer's beliefs make him or her entirely free to observe ... Critical essays on Flannery O'Connor 906445964. ix, 227 pages ; 25 cm. This volume contains include twenty-eight reviews and critical essays related to American writer and essayist Flannery O'Connor's (1925-1964) life and work. The collection begins with an introduction, which survey's O'Connor's career and the critical reaction to it, the remaining selections are arranged into ... Analysis of Flannery O'Connor's Stories The Geranium. O'Connor's six earliest stories first appeared in her thesis at the University of Iowa. The most memorable in terms of O'Connor's later themes are "The Geranium," her first published story, and "The Turkey." "The Geranium," an early version of O'Connor's last story, "Judgement Day," deals with the experience of a southerner living in the North. MELVIN J. FRIEDMAN and BEVERLY LYON CLARK. Critical Essays on Flannery Critical Essays on Flannery O'Connor. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1985. pp. 227. Sarah Gordon In his introduction to this collection, Melvin Friedman notes the abundance of criticism on O'Connor's works, the amount now far outweighing the slim fic tional legacy of the author herself. While much of this commentary is repetitious Analysis of Flannery O'Connor's The Life You Save May Be Your Own By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 28, 2021. As a devout Catholic, Flannery O'Connor felt her calling in life was to convert her readers through her stories. As with many of O'Connor's stories, in "The Life You Save May Be Your Own," readers must struggle to define what is and is not morally correct. This is the story about a drifter who ... Critical Insights: Short Fiction of Flannery O'Connor Find," which reveals the thoroughness of O'Connor's foreshadowing, praises the precision of her craft, and decries the recent paucity of "discussions of her use of form, design, and structures" (70). The critical essays cover a wide range of topics, and all are respectful toward but Flannery O'Connor Criticism Critical Essays Essays and Criticism Flannery O'Connor American Literature Analysis ... Flannery O'Connor Criticism. O'Connor, (Mary) Flannery (Vol. 15) Introduction; Flannery O'Connor, 1925 ... Critical Essays on Flannery O'Connor This volume contains include twenty-eight reviews and critical essays related to American writer and essayist Flannery O'Connor's (1925-1964) life and work. The collection begins with an introduction, which survey's O'Connor's career and the critical reaction to it, the remaining selections are arranged into three sections -- the first, offers twelve reviews dealing with O'Connor's two novels ... Flannery O'Connor Mary Flannery O'Connor (March 25, 1925 - August 3, 1964) was an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. She wrote two novels and 31 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. ... as well as critical essays on her work. Workshop director Paul Engle was the first to read and comment on the initial drafts of ... O'Connor and the Critics: An Overview An Overview*. In the decade since her death, the fiction of Flannery O'Connor has been the subject of more critical attention than has that of any writer since William Faulkner. To date there are no less than eleven book-length studies of her work, while shorter ar ticles and reviews number in the hundreds. Indeed, a twelfth. Analysis of Flannery O'Connor's Good Country People By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 25, 2021. In a memorable contribution to her stories that use the grotesque, Flannery O'Connor's "Good Country People" ironically reverses the old saying that country people are good and its corollary, simple. Set in Georgia, the story features three women and a Bible salesman. As in most of O'Connor's ... Flannery O'Connor's challenge to the Lost Cause myths of the The human cost of such self-deception is the subject of an early and little-known story by Flannery O'Connor, "A Late Encounter with the Enemy." Originally published in Harper's Bazaar in 1953 and included in A Good Man Is Hard to Find two years later, the story is about the ways in which the burdens of history, when honestly confronted ... Flannery O'Connor Short Fiction Analysis Essays and criticism on Flannery O'Connor, including the works "The Geranium", "The Turkey", A Good Man Is Hard to Find, "The Life You Save May Be Your Own", "The Artificial Nigger ... Critical Essays on Flannery O'Connor (Critical Essays on American Friedman and Clark include twenty-eight reviews and critical essays related to Flannery O'Connor's life and work, all reprints except for selections by Irving Malin and Janet Egleson Dunleavy. Selections are arranged into three sections: the first, offering twelve reviews dealing with O'Connor's two novels, and her collections of short stories ... Flannery O'Connor Long Fiction Analysis Essays and criticism on Flannery O'Connor, including the works Wise Blood, The Violent Bear It Away - Critical Survey of Long Fiction. Select an area of the website to search Online O'Connor Resources A Good Writer is Hard to Find Ronald Weber takes a look at the importance of O'Connor's religious faith in her writing in this bio-critical essay. Flannery O'Connor Banned J. Bottom points out the irony of a bishop banning O'Connor from a Catholic school and uses it as a springboard for an exploration of what Catholicism means in the 21st century. Anatomy of a Cover: The Complete Works of Flannery O'Connor At the time of her death, at age thirty-nine, Flannery O'Connor had published only two novels, thirty-one short stories, and a small book's worth of literary criticism and critical essays. "In most English classes," she once wrote, "the short story has become a kind of literary specimen to be dissected.". O'Connor, of course, was ... Flannery O'Connor; a critical essay : Drake, Robert, 1930- : Free Flannery O'Connor; a critical essay by Drake, Robert, 1930-Publication date 1966 Topics O'Connor, Flannery -- Criticism and interpretation, O'Connor, Flannery, O'Connor, Flannery, 1925-1964, Women and literature -- Southern States -- History -- 20th century, Christian fiction, American -- History and criticism, Christianity and literature ... Flannery O'Connor Criticism: Introduction Introduction. Flannery O'Connor 1925--1964. (Full name Mary Flannery O'Connor) American short fiction writer, novelist, and essayist. The following entry presents criticism of O'Connor's short ... Salem Press Flannery O'Connor's career as a writer lasted only twelve years. However, this small corpus is as distinctive a body of work as any in modern writing. It is work that demands our full attention but eludes our full understanding. Each essay is 5,000 words in length, and all essays conclude with a list of "Works Cited," along with endnotes. Flannery O'Connor: A Critical Essay Flannery O'Connor: A Critical Essay Robert Drake Snippet view - 1966. Common terms and phrases. ain't Andalusia Farm Artificial Nigger artist Asbury Baldwin County blind certainly characters Christian concerns Church contemporary course critics death deformity Devil Displaced Person ecumenical Enoch essay Everything That Rises eyes Farrar ... O'Connor, (Mary) Flannery (Vol. 6) O'Connor, (Mary) Flannery 1925-1964. Miss O'Connor was an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist whose work is at the center of the Southern Renascence. The groundnote of Miss O ... Flannery O'Connor Criticism: Introduction Flannery O'Connor 1925-1964 (Full name Mary Flannery O'Connor) American short story writer, novelist, and essayist. The following entry provides criticism on O'Connor's works from 1982 through 2001. assignment essay homework phd report resume review speech thesis