Page "American literature" Paragraph 76

In the postwar period, the art of the short story again flourished.

Among its most respected practitioners was Flannery O ' Connor ( b. March 25, 1925 in Georgia – d. August 3, 1964 in Georgia ), who renewed the fascination of such giants as Faulkner and Twain with the American south, developing a distinctive Southern gothic esthetic wherein characters acted at one level as people and at another as symbols.

A devout Catholic, O ' Connor often imbued her stories, among them the widely studied " A Good Man is Hard to Find " and " Everything That Rises Must Converge ", and two novels, Wise Blood ( 1952 ); The Violent Bear It Away ( 1960 ), with deeply religious themes, focusing particularly on the search for truth and religious skepticism against the backdrop of the nuclear age.

Other important practitioners of the form include Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, John Cheever, Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, and the more experimental Donald Barthelme.