A Hundred Years of Flannery O’Connor: Re-Visiting Her Legacy
The year 2025 will mark the centennial of one of the most powerful voices in twentieth-century American Literature. Author of a reduced fictional production (two novels and three collections of short stories), Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) remains among the most widely praised authors of the United States, to the extent that, shortly after her premature death, claims by, among others, Brainard Cheney, Robert Giroux, and Caroline Gordon were made about the country having lost their next Nobel Laureate for Literature. Alternative history aside, what is true is that the last century of American literature would have lost an enormous amount of its meaning without the existence of Flannery O’Connor’s writing.