Comforts
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What will you find here?

Comforts of Home focuses on Flannery O'Connor related information evaluated for its reliability and usefulness: links to biographical information about Flannery O'Connor, critical analysis of her work, and general praise of her abilities as a writer and a human being. If you're searching for essays and other scholarship on Flannery O'Connor published on the Web, we try to catch everything that we think is truly helpful. Be aware that most critical analysis of O'Connor is in hard-copy (see: Offline Resources).

News for February

Postmarked Milledgeville offers a catalogue of Flannery O'Connor's correspondence held in various libraries and archives. The website provides descriptions of letters to and from O'Connor and serves as a guide to what can be found, including a description of broad topics mentioned in the letters.

We got a very interesting question from Turman Adkins the other day: "I was wondering if anyone has ever determined why Flannery O'Connor would teach a chicken to walk backward?" Truman and I have shared some thoughts, including mention of said chicken and the road, but we still don't know for sure. I've a feeling we may need to install a forum on the site so people can discuss things like this, but feel free to e-mail us about it if you have some input. 

Professor Amy Hungerford teaches the OpenYale course on "The American Novel Since 1945", and you may be particularly interested in her lectures on Wise Blood. (Thanks to Joe Johnson for the tip.)

I've been pointed to a Library of America interview with Brad Gooch, author of the recent Flannery: a Life of Flannery O'Connor. (See below for a review of the book.) The conversation touches on O'Connor's motivations, aspirations and personal life, but it's not particularly revealing if you've read The Habit of Being, so you'll have to get Gooch's book if you want to see how he treats any of these topics in-depth.

Blake Bailey gives a delightful review of Flannery: a Life of Flannery O'Connor (thanks to Waldo Jaquith of the Virginia Quarterly Review for telling me about it), there's another good write-up at the American Interest, and Joseph O'Neill of the Atlantic sort-of reviews Gooch's book but gets caught up in the spiritual drama in O'Connor's fiction (which isn't a bad thing).

Between 1971 and the present, Joyce Carol Oates has written several essays on O'Connor's prose, fiction and letters, which are collected on Oates' University of San Francisco website for your reading pleasure.  (Thank Randy Souther for informing us about this treasure.)

We've noticed a rising interested in film adaptations of O'Connor's fiction, and while Hollywood hasn't taken up the challenge recently (which might be a good thing), several productions have already translated O'Connor's stories to the screen.

Thanks to the efforts of the Flannery O'Connor-Adalusia Foundation anyone can now visit Andalusia, the farm where O'Connor spent much of her adult life and wrote most of her stories.

Educators take note of this online resource. While it contains an immense amount of helpful information about American literature, our interest in the electronic resources of the Heath Anthology of American Literature lies in their Instructor's Guide to building a course or unit on Flannery O'Connor. This well thought out guide covers classroom strategies, discussion questions, major themes, and a concise bibliography.

Biography: Who was Mary Flannery O'Connor?

Online Essays: Criticism of O'Connor's work on the Internet. Many of these are "scholarly," but there are several non-academic articles here as well, so be careful if you use them for a paper.

Offline Essays: A bibliography of print resources. Most of these are in journals, and as far as I know they are academic, not popular articles.

Books : Works by and about O'Connor available online or at your local bookstore.

(If you want to see everything Amazon offers on O'Connor, you can test drive this new connection I'm working on that automatically searches for anything tagged Flannery O'Connor.)

Other Sites: The requisite "links" page. Don't waste your time searching for O'Connor sites on the net, just click here.

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