Book Award.disciplined as a writer, O Connor forced herself to sit at her desk without conscious distraction of any sort at the same time every day for two hours, even if no inspiration came. Sometimes I work for months and have to throw everything away , she commented, but I don t think any of that time was wasted. Something goes on that makes it easier when it does come well . While her central concern in her fiction was the abstract idea of ​​good and evil, she felt compelled to confine herself to the concrete. The peculiar problem of the short-story writer , she noted, is how to make the action he describes reveal as much of the mystery of existence as possible. He has only a short space to do it in and he can t do it by statement. He has to do it by showing, not by saying, and by showing the concrete - so that his problem is how to make the concrete work double time for him. the first, she was recognized as a satirist of astonishing originality and vigor, whose targets were smugness, optimism, and self-righteousness. However, the essential element of Flannery O Connor s life and work was that she was born a Roman Catholic and that she remained one without the slightest wavering of faith throughout her thirty-nine years. A thunder-and-lightning Christian belief pervades every story and novel she ever wrote. Her attraction to the grotesque and the violent puts off many critics and readers. They fail to appreciate that the violent motifs in her fiction grow from her passionate, Christian vision of our secular times. What she wanted to tell us, in a voice that could not be ignored, was that in our rationality we had lost the one essential - a spiritual center for our lives.title story of A Good Man Is Hard to Find, for example, concerns a family of six, all of whom are killed by an escaped convict, the Misfit. When the grandmother pleads with the Misfit to pray to Jesus for help, he replies: I don t need any help. I m doing all right by myself. O Connor seems to be saying that we have become so accustomed to the lack of God in our life., throughout most of her adult life, O Connor suffered from lupus, a rare crippling auto-immune disease that had killed her father and eventually took her life. Because of her disease she set her apart from other people. O Connor developed a deep sensitivity to misfits and outsiders. Not surprisingly, many of her most memorable characters are social outcasts or people who are in some way mentally or physically disabled. There is an underlying sense of sympathy concerning their pain and suffering.O Connor s work reflects her intense commitment to her personal beliefs. In her exaggerated tragic and at times shockingly violent tales, she forces us to confront such human faults as hypocrisy, insensitivity, self-centeredness, and prejudice.her short life and modest output, O Connor is probably the most admired American woman writer of the postwar years. A collection of essays and miscellaneous prose Mastery and Manners (1961), and her selected letters, The Habit of Being (1979), reveal an engaging social side of her personality that is not always apparent in her fiction.
John Updike
1932-2009with what seems a total recall of what it is like to grow up in the American middle class, Updike also displays a skill with language that can evoke our responses to even the most ordinary and familiar events . In short, his talent is for taking our common daily experience and endowing it with both substance and importance. He is acknowledged as a distinguished stylist.Updike was born on March 18, 1932 and grew up in the small town of Shillington in rural Pennsylvania. In his boyhood memoir, The Dogwood Tree, Updike portrays his youthful ambition as artistic: ... riding a thin pencil line out of Shillington, out of time altogether, into an infinity of unseen and even unborn hearts. He describes returning to Shillington as a mature, successful writer and confronting a picture of himself as this ambitious boy. He senses disappointment: Like some phantom conjured by this child from a glue bottl...
