Following the footsteps of Flannery O’Connor | csmonitor.com:
Frederic Hunter reports on a Southern vacation, where he and his wife visit the homes of some writers. He devotes most of the article to discussion of Flannery O’Connor’s home in Milledgeville, Georgia. In preparation for the visit he borrowed a book from the library and read some of O’Connor’s stories: “She’s something of an acquired taste: acute insights, penetrating and often humorous observations. Still her characters run to the grotesque. Her stories often jolt even shockproof 21st-century readers.”
This short article is worth reading for Hunter’s discussion of his meeting with a Milledgeville librarian and her stories about O’Connor’s mother, Miss Regina, and how the local people figured in O’Connors’s fiction.
Other places the Hunters visited were the Flannery O’Connor Museum in Savannah, the house in Flat Rock, North Carolina, where poet Carl Sandburg spent his last days, the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Site in Asheville, North Carolina, and, also in Asheville, the Grove Park Inn, where F. Scott Fitzgerald stayed while his wife, Zelda, was a patient as a nearby mental institution.
“A strange way to spend a holiday, some would say. But it deepens our reading, and our reading enriches our lives.”
