Flannery O’Connor TV Series

This will be a multi-episode series weaving Flannery O'Connor's short stories, letters, lectures, and the authorized biography.

O’Connor’s stories were chosen as the Best of the National Book Awards for Fiction from an impressive list of other National Book Award winners.

O'Connor's Influence:

Bruce Springsteen has called O'Connor's fiction a “big, big revelation,” and in tribute wrote and recorded the song, “A Good Man Is Hard To Find,” after her best known short story.

Springsteen explained, “There was some dark thing -- a component of spirituality that I sensed in her stories, and that set me off exploring characters of my own. She knew original sin -- knew how to give it the flesh of a story. She had talent and she had ideas, and the one served the other.” Los Angeles Times, 2009

The actor/director Tommy Lee Jones said in an interview, “Flannery O'Connor, has been an important influence on my creative life. I wrote a Cum Laude thesis on her at Harvard, and I've read every word she wrote, two or three times, and when you mention the word belief or faith, I would offer her definition of it, which is: ‘Faith is that which you know to be true, whether you believe it or not.’"

The singer and activist Bono said of O'Connor that he “...never felt such sympathy with a writer in America before.”

Bono's favorite story is “The Enduring Chill,” explaining, "It's a very sad and pathetic portrait of a guy, a very unromantic piece of writing, and it's just so powerful the way it describes his death as an enduring chill, that begins slowly."

Among other actors admitting O'Connor's influence are John Cusack, Billy Bob Thornton, Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, and Shirley MacLaine.