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Mary Flannery O'Connor (March 25, 1925 – August 3, 1964) was an American writer and essayist. An important voice in American literature, she wrote two novels and 32 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. She was a Southern writer who often wrote in a Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters. Her writing also reflected her own Roman Catholic faith, and frequently examined questions of morality and ethics. O'Connor's ''Complete Stories'' won the 1972 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction〔 and was named the "Best of the National Book Awards" by Internet visitors in 2009.〔 As part of the Fiction Award's 60th anniversary celebration, writers associated with the National Book Foundation composed a ballot of the best six of 77 winning books—77 because a few awards were split and there were multiple fiction categories for several years in the 1980s. ("A Celebration of the 60th National Book Awards" ) (2009 online poll). National Book Foundation: Awards: Best of the NBAs Fiction. Retrieved 2012-03-30.〕 ==Early years and education== O'Connor was born on March 25, 1925, in Savannah, Georgia, the only child of Edward F. O'Connor, a real estate agent, and Regina Cline. She described herself as a "pigeon-toed child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I'll-bite-you complex." When she was six, living at a home still standing, she experienced her first brush with celebrity status. The Pathé News people filmed "Little Mary O'Connor" with her trained chicken,〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.britishpathe.com/video/do-you-reverse-1/ )〕 and showed the film around the country. She said, "When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathé News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been an anticlimax." In 1937, her father was diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus. It led to his eventual death on February 1, 1941, and the 15-year-old O'Connor was left devastated.〔''The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage'', by Paul Elie, Copyright 2003, Farrar, Straus & Giroux.〕 O'Connor attended Peabody High School, where she worked as the school newspaper's art editor and from which she graduated in 1942.〔Gooch,Brad. Flannery:A Life of Flannery O'Connor. NY: Little, Brown, 2009, p. 76〕 She entered Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College & State University), in an accelerated three-year program, and graduated in June 1945 with a Social sciences degree. While at Georgia State College for Women, she produced a significant amount of cartoon work for the student newspaper.〔(''Flannery O'Connor, Cartoonist'', Hogan's Alley #2, 1995 )〕 In 1946, she was accepted into the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she first went to study journalism. While there she got to know several important writers and critics who lectured or taught in the program, among them Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Robie Macauley, Austin Warren and Andrew Lytle. Lytle, for many years editor of the ''Sewanee Review'', was one of the earliest admirers of her fiction. He later published several of her stories in the ''Sewanee Review'', as well as critical essays on her work. Workshop director Paul Engle was the first to read and comment on the initial drafts of what would become ''Wise Blood''. During the summer of 1948, O'Connor continued to work on ''Wise Blood'' at Yaddo, an artists' community in Saratoga Springs, New York where she also completed several short stories.〔Gooch, Brad. ''Flannery:A Life of Flannery O'Connor. NY:Little, Brown, 2009, p. 146-152〕 In 1949, O'Connor met and eventually accepted an invitation to stay with Robert Fitzgerald (a well-known translator of the classics) and his wife, Sally, in Redding, Connecticut.〔Various sources incorrectly cite Ridgefield, Connecticut, as his home from the 1940s into the 1960s. He, in fact, lived on Seventy Acres Road in the adjacent town of Redding. He and O'Connor used a Ridgefield mailing address on their correspondence because, in those days, rural delivery to that portion of Redding was done by the Ridgefield post office. This has been confirmed by articles that have appeared in ''The Redding Pilot'', the local newspaper, as well as searches through Ridgefield and Redding records.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Flannery O'Connor」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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