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Flannery O'Connor: A Brief Biography

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“When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God's business.” (O’Connor). This statement is encouraging to all believers in God, knowing that it is coming from a fellow Catholic like Flannery O’Connor. O’Connor is associated with the Christian Realism movement, which is a logical view developed by a theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, who argued that the Kingdom of God cannot be realized on earth because of the naturally corrupt trends of society (“Flannery O’Connor”). This movement began in the late 1940’s and along with it came a belief that presents a depiction from Christ. Although O'Connor's work were written during a time of great social change in the South, those changes—and the relationships among blacks and whites—were not at the center of her fiction; the reasoning is largely influenced by fundamentalist Protestants, many of whom she admired for the integrity of their search for truth and redemption. O‘Connor knew she was in the minority in her scorn for the increasing blasphemy of her time, and she refused to give up. O’Connor grew up in Georgia as a Roman Catholic (“Flannery O’Connor”). She grew up on a farm with her parents and her mother had raised birds. She consumed a love for peacocks and considered them her “symbol” (“Flannery O’Connor”).O’Connor growing up a Catholic influenced the themes in her works and the relationship between the
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