SOURCE: “Breakfast at Flannery's,” in Modern Age, Vol. 38, No. 3, Summer, 1996, pp. 245-52.

In the following essay, York offers a survey of dining and mealtime rituals as portrayed in Flannery O'Connor's short stories.

Flannery O'Connor made the peacock as familiar a cachet of Southern fiction as the Persians made the phoenix of mystical iconography. The two great birds can still be found together in Georgia, O'Connor's peacock feathers shared with countless established and aspiring writer-friends of hers, and the fabled phoenix on the great seal of the City of Atlanta. How fowl came to play so large a role in O'Connor's imagination is as mysterious as the phoenix of legend, but the chronology of her interest in birds and their eggs is recorded in her letters. The record begins early and earnestly: she wrote on March 3, 1957, of eating a good egg for breakfast, which left her “galvanized for the...