Special Collections in the Georgia College & State University Library in Milledgeville is a rich resource for in-depth study of O'Connor, no matter what approach a given participant may prefer. At the O'Connor Collection website, potential participants will find a thorough introduction to the Collection. The O'Connor Collection includes over 6,000 pages of O'Connor's fiction manuscripts. Participants are likely to find most interesting the portions of the Collection that relate to O'Connor's most-taught novel, Wise Blood. There are also numerous drafts relating to "The Life You Save May Be Your Own," "The Partridge Festival," "The Enduring Chill," "Parker's Back," and "Judgment Day," significant variants of a number of other stories, and O'Connor's work on other novels. Some participants will be interested in seeing hard-to-find published versions of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" or "The Displaced Person" or the little-known early story "The Coat." The best source for previewing the manuscripts at GCSU is The Manuscripts of Flannery O'Connor at Georgia College by Driggers, Dunn, and Gordon (U of Georgia P), and the best source for previewing all the published versions of O'Connor's works is David Farmer's Flannery O'Connor: A Descriptive Bibliography (Garland).

The significant collections of O'Connor's letters at GCSU (which can be previewed through the O'Connor Collection website) should be interesting to teachers and scholars who are interested in the intellectual communities of which O'Connor was a part. Participants might be interested in letters between O'Connor and the publishing house of Farrar Straus Giroux, letters between O'Connor and her classmate Betty Boyd Love, or (perhaps especially) the correspondence between O'Connor and the writer Maryat Lee (a good friend who was the sister of a President of Georgia State College for Women)--a set of letters that raises questions about race. And even letters that a participant has already read in the collection The Habit of Being can take on new meaning when the originals are examined without the deletions decided upon by O'Connor's editor and/or her mother. The vertical file in the O'Connor Collection (also described on the O'Connor Collection website) contains a wealth of documents that participants might browse for inspiration: her college transcripts, her will, information on the real events that served as the basis for a work, etc. Audiotapes are available of O'Connor lecturing and of O'Connor reading the story she used most for her public readings, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find."

Some participants will be most interested in surveying O'Connor's library, much of which is in the O'Connor Collection. O'Connor is generally believed to have used a consistent method of annotating books, and it is fairly easy to get a sense of her response to passages she marked. Participants interested in previewing the 700 books and journals from O'Connor's personal library may consult Flannery O'Connor's Library: Resources of Being by Arthur F. Kinney (U of Georgia P). Participants may also want to examine drafts of O'Connor's essays (published in Mystery and Manners ) and her book reviews (published in the collection The Presence of Grace and Other Book Reviews, comp. Leo J. Zuber, ed. Carter W. Martin, U of Georgia P).

The O'Connor Collection at GCSU includes a copy of nearly every article, dissertation, or book about O'Connor. Participants who examine Robert E. Golden's 1977 O'Connor bibliography (in Flannery O'Connor and Caroline Gordon: A Reference Guide, by Golden and Mary C. Sullivan) and R. Neil Scott's recent, supplementary work of 1,000+ pages, Flannery O'Connor: An Annotated Reference Guide to Criticism (Timberlane) may be confident they will find any listed source at GCSU. As a supplement to research materials in the O'Connor Collection, a set of texts important to the work of the Institute will be held at the Reserve Desk of the GCSU Library: works by and about O'Connor, as well as works requested by Institute Faculty as reading assignments for the seminar meetings.

Eight texts will be provided free to all participants in "Reconsidering Flannery O'Connor": The Habit of Being, Mystery and Manners, and Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works, as well as Flannery O'Connor's Religion of the Grotesque (Gentry), Flannery O'Connor, Hermit Novelist (Giannone), Flannery O'Connor: The Obedient Imagination (Gordon), New Essays on Wise Blood (ed. Kreyling), and Peculiar Crossroads (O'Gorman).