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Mystery and Manners Spiral-Bound | 1969-01-01

Flannery O'Connor Sally Fitzgerald (Edited by) Robert Fitzgerald (Edited by)

★★★★☆+ from 1,001 to 10,000 ratings

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This bold and brilliant collection is a must for all readers, writers, and students of American literature

When she died in 1964, Flannery O'Connor left behind a body of unpublished essays and lectures as well as a number of critical articles that had appeared in scattered publications during her lifetime. The brilliant pieces in Mystery and Manners, selected and edited by O'Connor's lifelong friends Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, are characterized by the boldness and simplicity of her style, a fine-tuned wit, understated perspicacity, and profound faith.
The book opens with "The King of the Birds," her famous account of raising peacocks at her home in Milledgeville, Georgia. There are three essays on regional writing, including "The Fiction Writer & His Country" and "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction"; two on teaching literature, including "Total Effect and the Eighth Grade"; and four on the writer and religion, including "The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South." Essays such as "The Nature and Aim of Fiction" and "Writing Short Stories" are gems. Their value to the contemporary reader--and writer--is inestimable.

Publisher: Macmillan
Original Binding: Trade Paperback
Pages: 256 pages
ISBN-10: 0374508046
Item Weight: 0.5 lbs
Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.9 x 8.2 inches
Customer Reviews: 4 out of 5 stars 1,001 to 10,000 ratings
"Flannery O'Connor ranks with Mark Twain and Scott Fitzgerald among our finest prose stylists. Her epigrams alone are worth the price of this book . . . which should be read by every writer and would-be writer and lover of writing." --John Leonard, The New York Times

Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925. A devout Catholic, she lived most of her life on a farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she raised peacocks and wrote. She was the author of two novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away; thirty-one short stories; and numerous essays and reviews. When she died at the age of thirty-nine, America lost one of its most gifted writers at the height of her powers.