One of God's Gifts to Literature

Flannery. She liked to drink Coca-Cola mixed with coffee. She gave her mother, Regina, a mule for Mother’s Day. She went to bed at 9 and said she was always glad to get there. After ­Kennedy’s ­assassination she said: “I am sad about the president. But I like the new one.” As a child she sewed outfits for her chickens and wanted to be a ­cartoonist.

Flannery O'Connor always struck me as a woman I would very much enjoy sitting with and having a drink. A complicated Catholic - but a devout Catholic still - her writings delve into the darker aspects of the human soul.

Although she was a devout Catholic, almost all of her characters, haunted, tested, and redeemed, are Protestant.In her avid reading, she found Protestant theologians superior to Catholic ones, though she was pleased to discover Teilhard de Chardin. She read a lot of theology because she believed it made her writing bolder. When she went to the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, she said, she “didn’t know a short story from an ad in the newspaper.” Yet she quickly became a star there and “scared the boys to death with her irony,” as a teacher put it.

I need to read this biography.