Overview: Explore the life and work of author Flannery O’Connor, whose distinctive Southern Gothic style influenced a generation of artists and activists.

DVD Verdict: With the Georgia farm of Andalusia as a backdrop, O'Connor's starkly, redemptive experiences — found in both her personal biography and her best-known works — come into focus.

Winner of the first-ever Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film, Flannery includes conversations with Mary Karr, Tommy Lee Jones, Hilton Als, and others.

Flannery O’Connor, in full Mary Flannery O’Connor, (born March 25, 1925, Savannah, Georgia, U.S. died August 3rd, 1964, Milledgeville, Georgia), was a noted American novelist and short-story writer whose works, usually set in the rural American South and often treating of alienation, concern the relationship between the individual and God.

O’Connor grew up in a prominent Roman Catholic family in her native Georgia. She lived in Savannah until her adolescence, but the worsening of her father’s lupus erythematosus forced the family to relocate in 1938 to the home in rural Milledgeville where her mother had been raised.

After graduating from Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College & State University) in 1945, she studied creative writing at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Her first published work, a short story, appeared in the magazine Accent in 1946. Her first novel, Wise Blood (1952; film 1979), explores, in O’Connor’s own words, the “religious consciousness without a religion.”

Wise Blood consists of a series of near-independent chapters — many of which originated in previously published short stories — that tell the tale of Hazel Motes, a preacher’s grandson who returns from military service to his hometown after losing his faith and then relocates to another town, this one populated by a grotesque cast of itinerant loners, false prophets, and displaced persons on the make.

His lonely tragicomic search for redemption, which includes his founding of the Church Without Christ, becomes increasingly violent and phantasmagorical. Wise Blood combines the keen ear for common speech, the caustic religious imagination, and the flair for the absurd that were to characterize O’Connor’s subsequent work.

With the publication of further short stories, first collected in A Good Man Is Hard to Find, and Other Stories (1955), she came to be regarded as a master of the form. The collection’s eponymous story became possibly her best-known work.

In it O’Connor created an unexpected agent of salvation in the character of an escaped convict called The Misfit, who kills a quarreling family on vacation in the Deep South.

Her other works of fiction are a novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960), and the short-story collection Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965).

A collection of occasional prose pieces, Mystery and Manners, appeared in 1969. The Complete Stories, published posthumously in 1971, contains several stories that had not previously appeared in book form; it won a National Book Award in 1972.

With oh-so much more to learn about this incredible person, in 'American Masters: Flannery' you get to watch never-before-seen archival footage, read newly discovered personal letters and hear her own published words alongside original animations and music to examine the life and legacy of an American literary icon. This is a Widescreen Presentation (1.78:1) enhanced for 16x9 TVs and comes with 4 Bonus Videos:

Watch The Making of 'Flannery': with Directors Elizabeth Coffman and Mark Bosco
Examine "The Geranium", O'Connor's first published story
Go inside the theatrical adaptation of "Everything that Rises Must Converge"
See how the 1939 premiere of Gone With the Wind led to "A Late Encounter with the Enemy."