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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 September

The 2010 Rimini Meeting included an exhibition entitled Flannery O'Connor: The Infinite Measure of the Limit, where Michael Fitzgerald (son of Sally and Robert Fitzgerald) gave a presentation on O'Connor. The conference has already concluded, but it's worth mentioning the increasing international recognition given to O'Connor. For anyone who can read Italian, there's an interview with Fitzgerald and a write-up in Libero.

In the National Catholic Reporter, Sr. Rose Pacatte considers O'Connor's relevance to today's audience with her article "Teaching a Chicken to Walk Backwards". The sly title should include a wink and a nod because, while she does mention O'Connor's talented chicken (which sparked a discussion here on Comforts a while ago), her article highlights the currents stirred up by O'Connor's fiction in popular culture including The Passion of the Christ and Lost. In the case of this article, the titular chicken is us.

PBS Religion and Ethics Weekly contains a fantastic Flannery O'Connor episode that includes interviews with Ralph Wood, Brad Gooch, Bruce Gentry and people influenced by O'Connor's work.

I didn't realize it the first time I watched the fifth season of Lost, but Jacob, one of the show's major characters, is reading Flannery O'Connor's Everything that Rises Must Converge on a bench before he resurrects John Locke after he was pushed out of an eighth story window. I'm not sure of the significance of the book within the television show, but I appreciate the producers' acknowledgement of O'Connor's importance.

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.)

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 interest 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 use this connection that searches 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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