Southern Gothic is a genre that many of us learned about in high school or college, and is an artistic subgenre in storytelling that is heavily influenced by Gothic rhetoric or elements. And Flannery O’Connor was a defining American novelist and short story writer who “is regarded as a master of the Southern Gothic” writing style, per Britannica. Her stories took place in the rural American South, which, as you may have guessed, is a major aspect of the genre. O’Connor was a devout Roman Catholic, which also showed up a ton in her work and helps with understanding the context of our quote of the day, which dives into some hard truths about stomaching reality.
O’Connor was born Mary Flannery O’Connor on March 25, 1925, in Savannah, GA, and was an only child, per the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home Museum. She went to Georgia State College for Women, graduating in 1945 with a degree in social science. She then got a journalism scholarship to the University of Iowa, but ended up transferring to the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Post-college, O’Connor moved to New York City and Connecticut to hopefully get her stories published, but after her diagnosis of lupus in 1951, she had to move back to Georgia to live with her mother on the family farm.
Mary Shelley was a defining literary figure in establishing Gothic horror, with its macabre storytelling. And Southern Gothic took those themes of death, religion, evil and more and set them in the South, adding in the horrors or scenarios that happen there. O’Connor’s expertise in writing this genre gained her acclaim; she was a three-time winner of the O’Henry Award for her stories “Greenleaf” (1957), “Everything That Rises Must Converge” (1963) and “Revelation” (1964). And she won the National Book Award for Fiction posthumously for The Complete Stories, a collection of unpublished works…