Literary Affairs presents a classic series of three Luncheon Lectures and Discussions with Julie Robinson and UCLA Professor of English, Charles Lynn Batten. Join us for this fun and informative series exploring three award winning southern writers. All luncheons are from 11:30AM-1PM at the Beverly Hills Country Club and include valet parking. Series Ticket Price: $195. Space is Limited.

Thursday March 13: The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty

Thursday April 10: As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

Thursday May 8: A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories by Flannery O'Connor


More About The Optimist's Daughter
Winner of the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: For More Information

ABOUT EUDORA WELTY

Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1909. She was educated locally and at Mississippi State College for Women, the University of Wisconsin, and the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. Her short stories appeared in The Southern Review, Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Bazaar, The New Yorker, and other magazines. She lectured at a number of colleges, held the William Allan Neilson professorship at Smith and the Lucy Donnelly Fellowship at Bryn Mawr, and was a lecturer at the Conference of American Studies at Cambridge University. She worked under grants from the Rockefeller and Merrill foundations and the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and held a Guggenheim Fellow-ship. She was given honorary degrees from Smith, the University of Wisconsin, Western College for Women, Denison University, the University of the South at Sewanee, and Millsaps College in Jackson. She also received the M. Carey Thomas Award from Bryn Mawr, the Brandeis Medal of Achievement, and the Hollins Medal; her novel The Ponder Heart was awarded the Howells Medal for Fiction by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Eudora Welty died in 2001.

More About As I Lay Dying
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949: For More Information

ABOUT WILLIAM FAULKNER

William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, on September 25, 1897. Faulkner had begun writing poems when he was a schoolboy and published a poetry collection in 1924 at his own expense. In 1950, Faulkner traveled to Sweden to accept the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature. He died of a heart attack on July 6, 1962.

More About A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories
Winner of the 1956 National Book Award in Fiction: For More Information

ABOUT FLANNERY O'CONNOR

Mary Flannery O’Connor was born in 1925 in Savannah, Georgia, the only child of Edward F. and Regina Cline O’Connor. The O’Connors lived at 207 East Charlton St. across LaFayette Square from the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist where the family attended Mass. In the spring of 1938, the family moved to Atlanta where Edward O’Connor was employed as a Federal Housing Authority real estate appraiser. In 1940, the O’Connors moved to Milledgeville to live in the Cline family home on Greene Street. Mr. O’Connor died of lupus early in 1941, and Mrs. O’Connor and Flannery continued to live in the Milledgeville family home along with Flannery’s aunts. It is here that Flannery would continue to live, with a bedroom on the second floor, while she attended Peabody High School and Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College & State University).

When Flannery O’Connor left Milledgeville in 1945 to attend the State University of Iowa, she enrolled in the Writers Workshop conducted by Paul Engle. Her thesis there comprised a collection of short stories entitled The Geranium, which would contain the seed of her first novel. She received a Master of Fine Arts degree after two years but remained in Iowa for another year before going to the Yaddo Foundation's
artist colony near Saratoga Springs, New York. Afterwards she lived in New York City where she was introduced to Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, with whom she lived for over a year in Ridgefield, Connecticut. During this time she was writing her first novel Wise Blood.

In late 1950 Flannery O’Connor began to exhibit symptoms of the disease that had killed her father. Her condition forced Flannery to return to Milledgeville in 1951, but she continued working on revised drafts of the novel even while she was in the hospital. But instead of returning to the family home in town, Flannery and her mother moved to the family farm, Andalusia, where Flannery lived for thirteen years, until her death in 1964.