I know many of our readers here are big fans of Flannery O’Connor…
Thus, it is with great delight that I share here these rare recordings of her reading her work!
“A Good Man is Hard to Find”
“In April of 1959–five years before her death at the age of 39 from lupus–O’Connor ventured away from her secluded family farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, to give a reading at Vanderbilt University. She read one of her most famous and unsettling stories, “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” The audio, accessible below, is one of two known recordings of the author reading that story.“
Essay: “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction”
[ Read the text of this essay here… ]
“Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological. That is a large statement, and it is dangerous to make it, for almost anything you say about Southern belief can be denied in the next breath with equal propriety. But approaching the subject from the standpoint of the writer, I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted. The Southerner, who isn’t convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God. Ghosts can be very fierce and instructive. They cast strange shadows, particularly in our literature. In any case, it is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature.”
Listen:
HT: Adam Ellis for alerting us to these recordings, as originally posted on Open Culture.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.
C. Christopher Smith is the founding editor of The Englewood Review of Books. He is also author of a number of books, including most recently How the Body of Christ Talks: Recovering the Practice of Conversation in the Church (Brazos Press, 2019). Connect with him online at: C-Christopher-Smith.com
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I have to say I did a better job of reading this aloud to my students. Of course, she’s written much better stories than me. We’ll call it a tie, Flannery. Memory Eternal!