History Creator / FlanneryOConnor

** 8 "The Enduring Chill" is similar, but Asbury is a fairly obvious poser even within his own social circle and his mother's reactionary attitudes are much less severe. Both are actually a lot more sympathetic than their counterparts in "Everything That Rises Must Converge".

* ReiAyanamiExpy: Mrs. Freeman in "Good Country People"

* FailOSuckyName: Hulga (née Joy) in "Good Country People" ''intentionally'' chooses the ugliest name she can think of as an act of rebellion against her positive thinking mother.

* ShootTheShaggyDog: "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" is essentially this.
* SouthernGothic

* LaserGuidedKarma: Mrs May in "Greenleaf" is annoyed by her neighbour's bull and when it escapes onto her property, she orders its owner to kill it. [[spoiler: He doesn't kill it, and instead it gores Mrs May to death, much to her surprise.]]

* LaserGuidedKarma: Mrs May in "Greenleaf" is annoyed by her neighbour's bull and when it escapes onto her property, she orders its owner to kill it. [[spoiler: He doesn't, and instead it gores her to death.]]

* WhatTheHellHero: In "The Lame Shall Enter First", the widowed main character, a cold, unsympathetic, rationalist {{Hypocrite}}, brings a charismatic, teenaged, club-footed tearaway [[TheSoulSaver Soul Saver]] into his own home, and treats the kid with more respect than he treats his own numb-with-grief son. Big mistake, pal. [[spoiler: The kid with the club foot persuades the protagonist's son that he'll be happier if he [[DrivenToSuicide joins his mommy in heaven]].]]

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* FriendlessBackground: [[RealLifeWritesThePlot Flannery herself.]]

* SpoiltBrat: John Wesley and June Starr in "A Good Man is Hard to Find." (Just try to think of two more rude or hateful children in literature.)

* BlackComedy
* ComicallyMissingThePoint

* CrapsackWorld

* ImpoverishedPatrician

* JesusSaves
* KarmaHoudini

* RapePortrayedAsRedemption

Flannery O'Connor lived in rural Georgia in the middle of the 20th century and wrote two collections of extraordinarily grotesque...er..."realistic" short stories and two novels in the course of her very short life (she died in 1964 at the age of 39). From the mindset of her deep Catholic faith; her intimate and perceptive knowledge of the culture, mores, and personalities of the Deep South; and shaded by her long battle with lupus (which eventually killed her), she wove tales replete with deeply dysfunctional, highly flawed, and bizarre characters, many adhering to an unconventional or twisted form of fundamentalist Christianity. And many who died gruesome deaths.

* ExecutiveMeddling: One of the only adaptations of her work O'Connor got to view first-hand in her lifetime was a dramatized version of the short story "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" on CBS's ''Schlitz Playhouse''. Between the [[StuntCasting horrible miscasting]] of GeneKelly (!) as the lead, and the [[RevisedEnding revision of the ending]] to make it more palatable, it was a sure bet O'Connor would be mortified. "The best thing I can say is that it conceivably could have been worse," she wrote to a friend. "Just conceivably."

http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/oconnor_4938.jpg

->"Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic."
-->-- '''Flannery O'Connor'''

* DumbIsGood: "Everything That Rises Must Converge" deals with a conflict between an "enlightened" young man and his more down-to-earth mother. The young man turns out to be an infantile hypocrite who justifies his pettiness with his "education." Some ValuesDissonance may come into play, too, since the sympathetic mother happens to be pretty blatantly racist.
** YMMV: The mother's racism is not downplayed.

* DumbIsGood: "Everything That Rises Must Converge" deals with a conflict between an "enlightened" young man and his more down-to-earth mother. Naturally, the young man turns out to be an infantile hypocrite who justifies his pettiness with his "education." Some ValuesDissonance comes into play, too, since the sympathetic mother happens to be pretty blatantly racist.
** "The Enduring Chill" is similar, but Asbury is a fairly obvious poser even within his own social circle and his mother's reactionary attitudes are much less severe. Both are actually a lot more sympathetic than their counterparts in "Everything That Rises Must Converge".