Metamorphosis (Kafka) Poems and Stories. Rare 1959 Audio: Flannery O'Connor Reads 'A Good Man is Hard to Find' Flannery O'Connor was a Southern writer who, as Joyce Carol Oates once said, had less in common with Faulkner than with Kafka and Kierkegaard.
Isolated by poor health and consumed by her fervent Catholic faith, O'Connor created works of moral fiction that, according to Oates, “were not refined New Yorker stories of the era in which nothing happens except inside the characters' minds, but stories in which something happens of irreversible magnitude, often death by violent means. " In imagining those events of irreversible magnitude, O'Connor could sometimes seem outlandish--even cartoonish--but she strongly rejected the notion that her perceptions of 20th century life were distorted.
Bremen. I think that if there is any value in hearing writers talk, it will be in hearing what they can witness to and not what they can theorize about.
My own approach to literary problems is very like the one Dr. Johnson's blind housekeeper used when she poured tea–she put her finger inside the cup. These are not times when writers in this country can very well speak for one another. In the twenties there were those at Vanderbilt University who felt enough kinship with each other's ideas to issue a pamphlet called, I'll Take My Stand, and in the thirties there were writers whose social consciousness set them all going in more or less the same direction; but today there are no good writers, bound even loosely together, who would be so bold as to say that they speak for a generation or for each other.
O'Connor on "A Good Man is Hard to Find" Short Story Criticism Thomas Votteler.
"Sonny's Blues" Lecture. Good Old Wallace.