Flannery O Connor中英对照生平介绍.docVIP

Flannery O Connor Flannery O’Connor, in full Mary Flannery O’Connor (born March 25, 1925, Savannah, Ga., U.S.—died Aug. 3, 1964, Milledgeville, Ga.), American novelist and short-story writer whose works, usually set in the rural American South and often treating of alienation, are concerned with the relationship between the individual and God. O’Connor grew up in a prominent Roman Catholic family in her native Georgia. She lived in Savannah until her adolescence, but the worsening of her father’s lupus erythematosus forced the family to relocate in 1938 to the home in rural Milledgeville where her mother had been raised. After graduating from Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College State University) in 1945, she studied creative writing at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her first published work, a short story, appeared in the magazine Accent in 1946. Her first novel, Wise Blood (1952; film 1979), explored, in O’Connor’s own words, the “religious consciousness without a religion.” Wise Blood consists of a series of near-independent chapters—many of which originated in previously published short stories—that tell the tale of Hazel Motes, a man who returns home from military service and founds the Church Without Christ, which leads to a series of interactions with the grotesque inhabitants of his hometown. The work combines the keen ear for common speech, caustic religious imagination, and flair for the absurd that were to characterize her subsequent work. With the publication of further short stories, first collected in A Good Man Is Hard to Find, and Other Stories (1955), she came to be regarded as a master of the form. The collection’s eponymous story has become possibly her best-known work. In it O’Connor creates an unexpected agent of salvation in the character of an escaped convict called The Misfit, who kills a quarreling family on vacation in the Deep South. Her other works of fiction are a novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960), and th