Author Description

"Flannery O'Connor: The Obedient Imagination shows us a writer whose world was steeped in male presumption regarding women and creativity. The book is filled with fresh perspectives on O'Connor's Catholicism, her upbringing as a dutiful, upper-class southern daughter, her readings of Thurber, Poe, Eliot, and other arguably misogynistic authors, and her schooling in the New Criticism.". "As Gordon leads us through a world premised on expectations at odds with O'Connor's strong and original imagination, she ranges across all of O'Connor's fiction and many of her letters and essays. While acknowledging O'Connor's singular situation, Gordon also gleans insights from the lives and works of other southern writers, Eudora Welty, Caroline Gordon, and Margaret Mitchell among them."--BOOK JACKET.