Flannery O’Connor free audio

Nathan Peters at the First Things blog points us to a couple audio files of Flannery O’Connor speaking at Notre Dame a year before she died. It’s great to hear her speak, in a nice, deep Southern accent. I first read O’Connor at the University of North Carolina (Charlotte) in a class called, “Growing Up Southern,” and then again at Aberdeen in a class focusing on distinctives of Catholic thought (in this case, Thomist “earthiness”). There’s so much great Southern literature, but it doesn’t get better than Flannery O’Connor in Southern caricature (in a good, literary sense, but also in a pejorative sense as a polemic against puritanical religion). Her place in the canon of American literature is well-established, and if you want to purchase some of her works, you might as well get the Library of America volume of her collected works.