Mystery and Manners

This bold and brilliant collection is a must for all readers, writers, and students of American literature

When she died in 1964, Flannery O'Connor left behind a body of unpublished essays and lectures as well as a number of critical articles that had appeared in scattered publications during her lifetime. The brilliant pieces in Mystery and Manners, selected and edited by O'Connor's lifelong friends Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, are characterized by the boldness and simplicity of her style, a fine-tuned wit, understated perspicacity, and profound faith.
The book opens with "The King of the Birds," her famous account of raising peacocks at her home in Milledgeville, Georgia. There are three essays on regional writing, including "The Fiction Writer and His Country" and "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction"; two on teaching literature, including "Total Effect and the Eighth Grade"; and four on the writer and religion, including "The Catholic Novel in the Protestant South." Essays such as "The Nature and Aim of Fiction" and "Writing Short Stories" are gems. Their value to the contemporary reader-and writer-is inestimable.

Foreword

I
The King of the Birds

II
The Fiction Writer and His Country
Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction
The Regional Writer

III
The Nature and Aim of Fiction
Writing Short Stories
On Her Own Work

IV
The Teaching of Literature
Total Effect and the Eighth Grade

V
The Church and the Fiction Writer
Novelist and Believer
Catholic Novelists and Their Readers
The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South

VI
Introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann

Appendix
Notes