Originally published at The Catholic Thing
Flannery O’Connor, arguably the best Catholic writer this country ever produced, was born 100 years ago tomorrow in Savannah, Ga. Her short life was marked by profound suffering, as her sometimes violent stories attest. But she wrote that “grotesque Southern fiction” because she thought her characters needed to confront the mysteries of evil and grace, and she believed this confrontation must be violent and comic to her secular and “Christ-haunted” audience. She knew her readers were coarsened and that it would take something drastic to get them to see the reality of sin and the necessity of grace.
