American Masters

One critic called her perhaps the most naturally gifted

of American novelists

Flannery O'Connor. (light music) A Good Man Is Hard To Find. Wise Blood. Mystery and Manners. Everything That Rises Must Converge. She's one of the best writers of the 20th century. I've read everything that she's written. Flannery O'Connor is one of the writers least afraid to look at the darkness. "We've had an accident!" the children screamed in a frenzy of delight. "But nobody's killed," June Star said with disappointment." You think it's this bitter old alcoholic who's writing these really funny, dark stories, and then you find out she's a woman and that she's devoutly religious. (light music) Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia into an Irish Catholic community. You get someone who's writing out of a specific time, civic set of manners. What she found was mystery. I think that a serious fiction writer describes an action only in order to reveal a mystery. How was she going to find the stories? Cause she knows she needs to tell. and how is she going to tell them? (light music) (typewriter clicking) I do not want to be lonely all my life, but people only make us lonelier by reminding us of God. It's unbelievable. She was so sick. She never stopped writing. It was the illness that made her the writer that she is. I feel that the grotesquity of my own work is intensified by the fact that I'm a servant and a Catholic writer. She's really funny. She's often funny in a very dire way. She ignored the disapproval of her religion. She ignored the disapproval of her fiction. She just saw the mystery of the craziness. (light music) (bird cooing)