Lawrence Downes writes about his "pilgrimage" to Flannery O’Connor’s Georgia.
“Many people — me for instance — are in turn haunted by O’Connor. Her doctrinally strict, mordantly funny stories and novels are as close to perfect as writing gets. Her language is so spare and efficient, her images and character’s speech so vivid, they burn into the mind. Her strange Southern landscape was one I knew viscerally but, until this trip, had never set foot in. I had wondered how her fictional terrain and characters, so bizarre yet so blindingly real, might compare with the real places and people she lived among and wrote about.
Hence my pilgrimage to Milledgeville this fall....” – from “In Search of Flannery O’Connor,” by Lawrence Downes, New York Times