Biography Essay

Flannery O'Connor's life is best summarized in Robert Fitzgerald's introduction to Everything That Rises Must Converge. As friend and literary executor, Fitzgerald writes of her with candor and love: "She was a girl who started with a gift for cartooning and satire, and found in herself a far greater gift, unique in her time and place, a marvel." That gift, of course, was story telling. She wrote two novels and thirty-one short stories and the critical response to her work has been extraordinary. Since her death in 1964, eighteen books of criticism have been published, as well as three collections of essays and five bibliographical studies. In little more than three decades since her reputation began to develop in the mid 1950s, at least four hundred critical essays and reminiscences have appeared in journals.

One of the principal reasons for this overwhelming response to her fiction is...