Flannery O'Connor: A Girl Who Knew Her Own Mind - Hardcover

by Mary Carpenter (Author)

In her biography of writer Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964, née Mary Flannery), Mary Carpenter introduces young readers to one of the most renowned American authors. With an accessible style of writing, Flannery O'Connor gives younger readers an overview of O'Connor's life and examines the influences, such as her family, region, and education, that helped her become one of the most respected fiction writers of the twentieth century. In a frank but age-appropriate manner, Carpenter discusses the writer's rural southern upbringing, her relationship to race, her chronic lupus, and her Catholic faith. The book will appeal to younger (nine- to ten-year-old) readers with sophisticated interests along with, and maybe more importantly, those older middle-school students who are not yet skillful readers and who thus often search with difficulty for interesting topics presented in books of a shorter length than most written for that age group.

Mary Flannery's life is inspirational. Her childhood in Savannah, Georgia, was both difficult and privileged. During the Great Depression, her father had to leave home to find work and then became very ill. Later in small-town Milledgeville, Georgia, Flannery lived with her mother and an extended family of strong women. Flannery's ability to know her mind at an early age helped her build an artistic reputation starting in high school. Through her fiction, she went on to become a role model for unconventional girls everywhere and for anyone who dreams of becoming a writer.

Author Biography

MARY CARPENTER now writes a weekly health column, after a thirty-year career as a staff reporter for Time magazine and as a freelance journalist. Her articles and essays have been published in the Washington Post, the International Herald Tribune, People Magazine, the New York Times, and Cosmopolitan, and she is the author of two other middle-grade books: Rescued by a Cow and a Squeeze: Temple Grandin and Lost and Found in the Mississippi Sound: Eli and the Dolphins of Hurricane Katrina.