Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925. She lived most of her life on a farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she raised peacocks and wrote. She was the author of two novels (Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away), thirty-one short stories, and numerous essays and reviews. She died at the age of thirty-nine. Her complete short stories, published posthumously in 1971, received the National Book Award for fiction.
Benjamin B. Alexander, PhD, a dynamic classroom teacher with over forty years of experience, has lectured widely on American, medieval, and African-American literature, as well as political theory and public policy. Dr. Alexander is currently crafting a critical study of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson and Shakespeare, as well as reviewing the unpublished essays of Walker Percy and Ralph Ellison for possible publication.
