American short story writer Flannery O'Connor raised 40 peacocks, which became potent symbols for her fiction's elegant violence

A film crew captured a 5-year-old Flannery O’Connor and her talented chicken

British Pathé, an international news program, ventured out to Georgia to film O’Connor (then known by her given name, Mary) and her chicken, whom she’d taught to walk backward. O’Connor would later joke that it was the highlight of her life.

A selection of author Flannery O'Connor's witty letters

Flannery O'Connor wrote darkly humorous novels while cultivating a richly devout Catholic faith. One of the most renowned American authors of the 20th century, she also wrote many letters in a very charming and witty style. Read a selection of her best epistles here.

In Iowa, Flannery O'Connor decided to pursue creative writing

O’Connor enrolled in a master’s program in journalism at the University of Iowa, intending to pursue political cartooning, but quickly switched to creative writing. Her thesis was a collection of stories called “The Geranium.” The title story was eventually her first published piece.

O’Connor’s caretaker Emma Jackson had an early impact on her views

Flannery O'Connor had conflicting views on race. She criticized racism and mocked segregationists, yet made racist jokes. Scholars recently unearthed details from the O’Connor archive about Emma Jackson, a Black woman hired young Flannery's caretaker. O'Connor recounted learning about racism after being scolded for spending too much time with Jackson.

O’Keeffe collected animal skulls and bones for her art

O’Keeffe used bones as motifs in her work throughout her time in New Mexico. She famously stated, “The bones do not symbolize death to me. They are shapes that I enjoy … They're very lively.”

O'Connor believed grotesque fiction was realistic

O'Connor argued that although the style might not be recognizable to all readers, "the grotesque" attempts to reckon with life's inherent mystery. "Of course, I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader," she said, "unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic."

Georgia O'Keeffe's flower paintings are often assumed to be sexual, though the artist claimed she was simply interested in highlighting the beauty of flowers that most people neglect

Watch a Yale professor’s take on O’Connor’s ‘Wise Blood’

O’Connor’s first novel is about Hazel Motes, a World War II veteran who returns home and sets out to form an anti-religious congregation. It’s a striking debut and one that Yale professor Amy Hungerford taught in her course “The American Novel Since 1945.”

John Steinbeck often drew a pig with wings next to his signature, a character he affectionately called 'Pigasus.'

O'Keeffe's flowers are one of her most famous—and most misunderstood—motifs

Both critics and fans alike believed O'Keeffe's flower paintings were of female genitalia, though the artist never welcomed that interpretation. Part of the reason was that Freudian analysis was popular at the time they were first exhibited. Another was that her partner, Alfred Stieglitz, along with others in the art world, insisted on her work being erotic. Below is "Abstraction White Rose" from 1927.

Inside the pigeon race with $50K at stake

More than 1,000 pigeons are released each year at the American Racing Pigeon Union convention as owners wait to see which of the birds arrives home first. This essay unwraps the niche activity's paradoxical love for the birds despite its at times utilitarian treatment of them.

Joyce Carol Oates praised King's working-class characters

Joyce Carol Oates is a writer who, like Stephen King, has a massive body of work that moves between styles and genres. Unlike King, she was never derided by critics as being overly commercial. Introducing King at Princeton University in 1997 and 2016, she made the case for King as a serious American writer in the Gothic tradition of Edgar Allan Poe.

Bruce Springsteen's 'Nebraska' was influenced by writer Flannery O'Connor

Springsteen became obsessed with the "Southern gothic" writer when he began working on the songs for "Nebraska," inspired by O'Connor's tragic characters and grotesque imagery.

George Orwell, avid outdoorsman

The writer is often pigeonholed as either a cranky paranoiac or a self-righteous scold, but this essay by Danny Heitman explores a lesser-known side of Orwell's personality: his love for nature, something that's subtly expressed in some of his greatest works.

The scarecrow isn't an effective tool for farms, but it is a potent symbol in horror

Scarecrows are no longer the best way for farmers to prevent birds from messing with their crops, but the humanlike figures are still found in horror movies. Folklorists say that's because they recall an agrarian past that makes modern viewers uneasy.

Toni Morrison's novels were popular postmodern texts

Toni Morrison’s novels broke new ground in American fiction by using bold structures and colloquial voices to reckon with the country’s past, developing her approach through classic early novels like “The Bluest Eye” and “Beloved,” all the way to later works like “Home.” Morrison once said, “The meaning of a novel is in its structure.”

Dickens' pet inspired Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Raven'

Dickens had a pet raven named Grip and made him a character in the novel "Barnaby Rudge: a Tale of the Riots of Eighty." Poe reviewed the work and suggested the raven should play a bigger role. A few years later, he fixed the problem himself when he wrote his most famous poem, "The Raven." The bird is preserved at the Free Library Philadelphia.

Read an interview with Parton conducted by Andy Warhol

Both frequented Studio 54, the chic New York club, during the disco era, and Warhol admired the country singer for her bombshell image, which he emphasized with a 1984 cover story for his Interview magazine.

'Mockingbirds don't do one thing except make music for us to enjoy ... That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.'

-Harper Lee (1926-2016) in "To Kill a Mockingbird"

Famed poet TS Eliot rejected the manuscript for George Orwell's political fable 'Animal Farm,' writing that its criticism of authoritarianism was not 'the right point of view.'

Innovative novelist Don DeLillo wrote an erotic hockey novel under a pseudonym

The acclaimed writer—known for books like "White Noise" and "Underworld"—published "Amazons" in 1980 under the pen name Cleo Birdwell. The story claimed to be a memoir, written by a woman who secretly joined an NHL team. The ruse went beyond the text, too, with a female model posing as Birdwell for promotional events.

Prada is now in the short story business

Fashion house Prada commissioned Ottessa Moshfegh, author of "My Year of Rest and Relaxation" and "Eileen," to write "Ten Protagonists," a short story collection that includes photos of Cary Mulligan posing as the titular characters.

In the 1930s, three Australian soldiers were sent to fight emus with machine guns—and lost

As part of a post-WWI initiative to turn veterans into farmers, soldiers were given plots of land. After emus were found damaging the farmland, three men were sent to handle the flightless birds. These men ended up losing to the second-largest bird species in the world and potentially exacerbating crop losses by sending swaths of the birds running and trampling over wheat.

Crows are believed to have intelligence on par with a seven-year-old child and demonstrate complex behaviors, from problem-solving with tools to recognizing human faces.

'A word after a word after a word is power.'

- Author Margaret Atwood (1939-present)

See these 16 pieces of art evoking phobias of snakes, flying, spiders, and more. 

Restaurants are ramping up chicken dishes in 'The Great Chickening'

For decades, consumption of poultry meat has been on the rise in the US. Even more recently, restaurants have been focused on using the bird, citing its reliability, versatility, and the rising cost of beef. Nonetheless, avian flu has caused prices to fluctuate.

Families of true crime victims deal with added pain when their stories are publicized

True crime enthusiasts have never asked Annie Nichol to consent to public recountings of her sister's murder. For decades, Nichol has been inundated with gruesome dramatizations of one of life's greatest losses by people who profit from such productions. She has, however, been asked to share memories of her sister, though such memories "are all that I have left of her that haven't been exploited for public consumption."

Browse a detailed visual analysis of over 200,000 similes—comparisons that often use 'like' or 'as'—from popular fiction to see how frequently writers the same idiomatic expressions.

See which similes appear most often in popular fiction

The tragic Pulitzer Prize-winning image 'The Vulture and the Little Girl' (1993) generated controversy, raised concerns about ethics in photography, and eventually led to the photographer's death.

Mid-century modern graphic designers, known for their bright colors and bold lines in advertising, also found success with children's books.

A researcher recently discovered an interview from 1967 between groundbreaking journalist Joan Didion and the Grateful Dead, years before the band became an institution.

Larger animals like giraffes, elephants, and blue whales have developed a unique defense against cancer, a phenomenon known as Peto's Paradox

The first robot in literature may have been a 'mechanical man' in 1907's 'Ozma of Oz,' a book in L Frank Baum's 'Wizard of Oz' series.

20,000 letters to the advice columnist 'Dear Abby' provide insight into prevailing sex, religion, and LGBTQ fears, anxieties, and concerns from the 1950s onward.

Exploring the Larry Bird punch that almost changed March Madness

Comedy legend Catherine O'Hara, star of 'Schitt's Creek' and 'Home Alone,' quit 'Saturday Night Live' after just one week to return to her old job.

When caught in the mouths of cardinal fish, seed shrimp release glowing, bioluminescent chemicals, which alert predators of the cardinal fish, prompting the shrimp's ejection.

Frank Lloyd Wright's houses are historically hard to sell because they're old, subject to local landmark commissions, and often unfashionable

American dance legend Martha Graham, sometimes called 'the Picasso of dance,' refused to perform at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and conceived the piece 'Chronicle' in response to the experience.

Sunflowers have long been a symbol of nuclear disarmament because they can extract large amounts of radioactive cesium from soil.

Hotels in Cannes, the glamorous city on the French Riviera, hire hawks to ward off seagulls during the city's famous film festival.

SpongeBob exemplifies Aristotle's philosophy for living well because he understands that happiness doesn't come from external factors like money, recognition, or power.

Many legends about George Washington, including his supposed wooden teeth and the story of cutting down the cherry tree, lack evidence.

Chaos theory—informally known as the butterfly effect—is the reason why weather forecasts are presented with probabilities rather than certainties.

US intelligence allegedly pursued more than 600 schemes to assassinate Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro.

Dozens of S&P 500 stocks, including Coca-Cola and Walmart—known as the dividend aristocrats—have increased dividends every year for 25 years

'Silent' fireworks have gained more interest in recent years as a quieter celebratory option.

Some coin denominations have ridges etched on their sides, partly to prevent counterfeiting, in a practice called 'reeding.'