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Although Flannery O'Connor completed only a relatively small corpus of fiction during her brief life -- two novels and thirty-one short stories between 1945 and her death at thirty-nine in 1964 -- her stunning talent was immediately recognized, and her reputation has grown enormously since her death. This is not to imply, however, that her work has been universally applauded or even understood. Many readers have been disturbed by her bizarre characters and pervasive use of violence; others have been confused by her confounding of traditional regional, religious, and literary categories. O'Connor's awareness of mixing modalities is shown by her sly comment in a 15 September 1955 letter to Andrew Lytle: "The only thing that keeps me from being a regional writer is being a Catholic and the only thing that keeps me from being a Catholic writer (in the narrow sense) is being a Southerner." She likewise wrote her anonymous Atlanta correspondent "A" on 24 September 1955, "everything funny I have written is more terrible than it is funny."
Both in her life and her art, O'Connor combined seemingly contradictory elements.
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