12AP English Lit & Comp. Mr. Klein

Short Stories

Flannery O’Connor

American writer particularly acclaimed for her stories which combined comic with tragic and brutal. Along with authors like Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor belonged to the Southern Gothic tradition that focused on the decaying South and its damned people. O'Connor's body of work was small, consisting of only thirty-one stories, two novels, and some speeches and letters.

Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, the only child of a Catholic family. The region was part of the 'Christ-haunted' Bible belt of the Southern States. The spiritual heritage of the region shaped profoundly O'Connor's writing. O'Connor once explained that "I can write about Protestant believers better than Catholic believers - because they express their belief in diverse kinds of dramatic action which is obvious enough for me to catch. I can't write about anything subtle."

In 1950 O'Connor suffered her first attack from disseminated lupus, a debilitating blood disease that had killed her father. She returned to Milledgeville where she lived with her mother on her dairy farm. In spite of the illness, O'Connor continued to write and occasionally she lectured about creative writing in colleges. "I write every day for at least two hours," she said in an interview in 1952, "and I spend the rest of my time largely in the society of ducks."

O'Connor's short stories have been considered her finest work. With A Good Man Is Hard to Find, and Other Stories (1955) she came to be regarded as a master of the form. In the title story a grandmother, her son and daughter-in-law and their three children, are on a car journey. They encounter an escaped criminal called the Misfit and his two killers, Hiram and Bobby Lee. The family is casually wiped out by them when the grandmother recognizes the Misfit from his ''Wanted'' poster. The hallucinating grandmother murmurs: "Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children!" The Misfit shoots her and says: "She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."

Selected works:

  • Wise Blood, 1952
  • A Good Man Is Hard To Find, and Other Stories, 1955
  • The Violent Bear It Away, 1960
  • Three by Flannery O'Connor, 1964
  • Everything That Rises Must Converge, 1965
  • Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, 1969
  • The Complete Short Stories of Flannery O'Connor, 1971
  • The Habit of Being: Letters, 1979

James Baldwin

American writer, noted for his novels on sexual and personal identity, and sharp essays on civil-rights struggle in the United States. Baldwin also wrote three plays, a children's storybook, and a book of short stories. He gained fame with his first novel, GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN (1953), a story of hidden sins, guilt, and religious torments. In this and subsequent works Baldwin fused autobiographical material with analysis of social injustice and prejudices. Several of his novels dealt with homosexual liaisons.

James Baldwin was born in Harlem, New York City, as the son of a domestic worker. Illegitimate, he never knew his own father and was brought up in great poverty. When he was three, his mother married a factory worker, a hard and cruel man, who also was a storefront preacher. Baldwin adopted the surname from his stepfather, who died eventually in a mental hospital in 1943. At the age of 17 Baldwin left his home. After graduation from high school, he worked in several ill-paid jobs and started his literary apprenticeship.

Baldwin's strained relations with his stepfather, problems over sexual identity, suicide of a friend, and racism drove him in 1948 to Paris and London. Armed with two Bessie Smith records and a typewriter Baldwin finished the novel Go Tell It on the Mountain in Switzerland. Baldwin lived in Europe ten years, mainly in Paris and Istanbul, and later spent long periods in New York. In 1957 he returned to the U.S. in order to become involved in the Southern school desegregation struggle.

Go Tell It on the Mountain was based on the author's experiences as a teenage preacher in a small church. Baldwin had found release from his poor surroundings through a Pentecostal church. He was converted at age fourteen and served in the church as a minister for three years. Baldwin depicted two days in the life of the Grimes family. The 14-year- old John is a good student, religious, and sensitive. "Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father. It had been said so often that John, without ever thinking about it, had come to believe it himself." He has a long series of conflicts with his brutal stepfather, Gabriel, a preacher, who had fathered an illegitimate child in his youth. His mother has her own secrets. John's spiritual awakening unites the family but only superficially - John becomes ready to carry his own weight.

Selected works:

  • GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, 1953
  • NOTES OF A NATIVE SON, 1955
  • GIOVANNI'S ROOM, 1956
  • NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME, 1962
  • THE FIRE NEXT TIME, 1963 -
  • GOING TO MEET THE MAN, 1965
  • TELL ME HOW LONG THE TRAIN'S BEEN GONE, 1968
  • A RAP ON RACE, 1971
  • IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK, 1974
  • THE DEVIL FINDS WORK, 1976
  • JUST ABOVE MY HEAD, 1979

William Faulkner

American short story writer, novelist, best known for his Yoknapatawpha cycle, a comédie humaine of the American South, which started in 1929 with SARTORIS / FLAGS IN THE DUST and completed with THE MANSION in 1959. Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949. Faulkner's style is not very easyin this he has connections to European literary modernism. His sentences are long and hypnotic, sometimes he withholds important details, or refers to people or events that the reader will not learn about until much later.

William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, as the oldest of four sons of Murray Charles Faulkner and Maud (Butler) Faulkner. While he was still a child, the family settled in Oxford in north-central Mississippi. Faulkner lived most of his life in the town. About the age of 13, he began to write poetry. At the OxfordHigh School he played quarterback on football team and suffered a broken nose. Before graduating, he dropped out school and worked briefly in his grandfather's bank.

The Yoknapatawpha novels spanned the decades of economic decline from the American Civil War through the Depression. Racism, class division, family as both life force and curse, are the recurring themes along with recurring characters and places. Faulkner used various writing styles. The narrative varies from the traditional storytelling (LIGHT IN AUGUST) to series of snapshots (AS I LAY DYING) or collage (THE SOUND AND THE FURY). GO DOWN, MOSES (1942) was a short story cycle about Yoknapatawpha blacks and includes one of Faulkner's most frequently anthologized stories, 'The Bear', about a ritual hunt, standing as a symbol of accepting traditional cultural values.

With The Sound and the Fury (1929), his first masterwork, Faulkner gained recognition as a writer. Its title originated from the famous lines in Shakespeare's play Macbeth: "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more. It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing."

SANCTUARY (1931), In the story a young woman is raped by a murderer. She finds sanctuary in a brothel. In these and the following works Faulkner experimented with methods of narration, using page-long sentences, and forcing the reader to hold in mind details and phrases that are meaningful only at the end of the story.

Selected works:

  • THE MARBLE FAUN, 1924
  • SOLDIER'S PAY, 1926
  • MOSQUITOES, 1927
  • SARTORIS / FLAGS IN THE DUST, 1929
  • THE SOUND AND THE FURY, 1929
  • AS I LAY DYING, 1930
  • ABSALOM, ABSALOM!, 1936
  • THE UNVANQUISHED, 1938
  • GO DOWN, MOSES, 1942

John Updike

American novelist, short story writer and poet, internationally known for his novels RABBIT, RUN (1960), RABBIT REDUX (1971), RABBIT IS RICH (1981), and RABBIT AT REST (1990). They follow the life of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a star athlete, from his youth through the social and sexual upheavals of the 1960s, to later periods of his life, and to final decline. Updike's oeuvre has been large, consisting of novels, collections of poems, short stories, and essays. He has written a great deal of literary criticism. Among the writers whose works he has reviewed are such names as Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, Joyce Carol Oates, Iris Murdoch, Michael Tournier, Umberto Eco, Evgenii Evtushenko, Gabriel García Márquez.

John Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania. His childhood was shadowed by psoriasis and stammering, but his mother encouraged him to write. In his childhood Updike lived in an isolated farm. Escaping to the world of mystery novels, he consumed books by Erle Stanley Gardner, Ellery Queen, Agatha Christie, and John Dickson Carr. After high school Updike attended Harvard. "My inability to read bravely as a boy had this advantage: when I went to college, I was a true tabula rasa, and received gratefully the imprint of my instructors' opinion, and got good marks."

Updike majored in English in 1954, and edited the Harvard Lampoon. He started as a cartoonist, but then shifted to poetry and prose. Updike spent the academic year 1954-1955 at Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts in Oxford, England.

From the age of 23, Updike supported himself by writing. He moved to Ipswich, Massachusetts, where he lived for seventeen years. In 1958 Updike made his debut as a poet with the volume THE CARPENTERED HEN AND OTHER TAME CREATURES. Updike's first novel, THE POORHOUSE FAIR (1959), was about the residents of an old people's home.

The majority of Updike's non-fiction has been occasional, and he considers the opportunity to produce reviews educational for himself, "for writing educates the writer as it goes along." Or: "My purpose in reading has ever secretly been not to come and judge but to come and steal." In his reviews Updike measures writing with traditional maxims: felicity in style, accuracy in presenting one's subject, precision in describing the external and inner world, and humanistic values.

Selected works:

  • RABBIT, RUN, 1960
  • BECH: A BOOK, 1970
  • RABBIT REDUX, 1972
  • A MONTH OF SUNDAYS, 1975
  • RABBIT IS RICH, 1981
  • THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK, 1984
  • RABBIT AT REST, 1990
  • ODD JOBS, 1991
  • BRAZIL, 1994
  • GERTRUDE AND CLAUDIUS, 2000
  • VILLAGES, 2004
  • TERRORIST, 2006