For an excellent collection of articles about Flannery O’Connor, visit Joyce Carol Oates’ website at the following address:

http://jco.usfca.edu/onoconnor.html

Each time I read a Flannery O’Connor story, I come away from the experience with expanded and different impressions. My most recent reading of “The Geranium”—the first story in O’Connor’s 1947 thesis collection—provokes me to offer the following observations:

As a retired, southern gentleman—though I use the word “gentlemen” more than somewhat ironically—Old Dudley presents himself as a curmudgeonly though often pathetic old man who seemingly regrets his transplantation from the apparent comfort of his home in a southern boardinghouse to what he considers the unpleasantness of his unloving but dutiful daughter’s apartment in New York City.

More than half a century has passed since Flannery O’Connor’s first novel, Wise Blood (1952), intrigued readers and baffled most critics. O’Connor, in her brief life (1925-1964), went on to publish another novel (The Violent Bear It Away, 1960) and a collection of short stories (A Good Man is Hard to Find, 1955).

Here is a typical “sentence” from James Joyce”s Finnegan’s Wake: