Flannery O'Connor Recordings

Back in February 2009 I provided links to the only two voice recordings of Flannery O'Connor that I am aware of. Some others may exists but I certainly have been unable to find them. Recently, however, it was brought to my attention that these links have gone the way of most links on the worldwide web and are no longer valid. I did a brief search this afternoon and found some new links to the same recordings, which I have included below.

The first link is to O'Connor's reading of her well-known short story "A Good Man Is Hard To Find." Here's the link:  A Good Man Is Hard To Find. The recording is almost 40-minutes long and the quality is reasonably good, although if you are not used to a rural Georgia accent, you may struggle at times.

The second link brings you a lecture O'Connor gave at the University of Notre Dame:"Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Literature"

In my opinion, Flannery O'Connor was one of the great American fiction writers of the twentieth century. She died at the far too young age of 39 in 1964 of complications from Lupus. But in those few years she produced some absolutely wonderful literature. If you haven't read her, do so. Here's a link to her collected works, published in a single volume: Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works

Another book I highly recommend is The Habit of Being, a collection of many of her letters. It is a marvelous book, one that I have read and re-read over the years.