Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor was a prominent American writer known for her distinctive voice in the Southern Gothic genre. Born in 1925 in Savannah, Georgia, she was raised in a devout Catholic family and spent much of her life in Milledgeville, Georgia. O'Connor's literary career began in college, where she produced her first short story and later published several acclaimed works, including her novels "Wise Blood" and "The Violent Bear It Away," as well as short story collections such as "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." Her writing is characterized by its exploration of moral and religious themes, often presented through violent and grotesque narratives that reflect the complexities of human nature and southern culture. Despite facing significant health challenges due to lupus, O'Connor's work garnered critical acclaim and established her as a significant figure in American literature. Her unique blend of faith, regionalism, and realism continues to influence writers and resonate with readers, ensuring her legacy in the literary canon. O'Connor passed away in 1964, but her contributions to literature remain profound and widely studied.
Subject Terms
Flannery O'Connor
Author
- Born: March 25, 1925
- Birthplace: Savannah, Georgia
- Died: August 3, 1964
- Place of death: Milledgeville, Georgia
American writer
In her short lifetime, O’Connor created a small but significant body of fiction and nonfiction unique in American, southern, Roman Catholic, and feminist literature.
Area of achievement Literature
Early Life
Flannery O’Connor was the only child of Edward Francis O’Connor, Jr., and Regina Cline O’Connor, both of whom came from prominent southern Catholic families. O’Connor was a happy, sensitive, and independent child. When she was twelve, her father became critically ill with disseminated lupus, a rare and incurable metabolic disease, and the family moved from Savannah into the Cline home in Milledgeville, which formerly had been the governor’s mansion (when Milledgeville was the capital of Georgia). Three years later her father died.
O’Connor attended Catholic elementary schools, Peabody High School, and Georgia College (then Georgia State College for Women) in Milledgeville, receiving an A.B. degree in 1945. While in college, she served as art editor and cartoonist for the school newspaper, editor of the literary quarterly, and feature editor of her yearbook.
She received a scholarship to study for an M.F.A. degree at the University of Iowa’s School for Writers, under the direction of Paul Engle. In 1946, while still a student, she published her first short story, “The Geranium,” in Accent magazine. She began work on her first novel, Wise Blood, which won her the Rinehart-Iowa Fiction Award in 1947. In 1947 and 1948, four short stories from her master’s thesis, “The Heart of the Park,” “The Train,” “The Peeler,” and “The Turkey,” were published in prestigious “little magazines.”
Life’s Work
Flannery O’Connor’s accomplishments in college and graduate school won for her a place in the fall of 1948 as writer-in-residence at Yaddo, an artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. There she met writers Robert Lowell, Edward Maisel, and Elizabeth Hardwick. That year she also engaged Elizabeth McKee as her literary agent. She was then twenty-three years old.
Early in 1949, political turmoil at Yaddo surrounding the well-known journalist Agnes Smedley led many of the artists, including O’Connor, to withdraw. She returned briefly to Milledgeville, spent the summer writing in a furnished room in New York, and then moved in September to the Ridgefield, Connecticut, home of Robert Fitzgerald, a well-known poet and translator, and Sally Fitzgerald, also a writer.
O’Connor worked on her novel Wise Blood while helping the Fitzgeralds with the care of their children. During the train ride home to Milledgeville during the Christmas holidays in 1950, she suffered her first severe, almost fatal, attack of what was later diagnosed as disseminated lupus. With the help of ACTH, a cortisone derivative, O’Connor slowly recovered, and in July, 1952, she and her mother moved to their family farm, Andalusia, outside Milledgeville.
O’Connor gradually adjusted to her circumstances and organized her life around her work. She drew on her daily experience for the materials of her stories, entertained a wide variety of visitors, wrote numerous letters, and delighted in raising ducks, geese, and peacocks. While she was able, she accepted invitations to lecture at colleges and libraries. By 1955, the weakness of her bones made it necessary for her to use crutches, and except for one trip to Europe, she rarely left Andalusia.
During the first year of her illness, O’Connor completed revisions of Wise Blood. After five years’ work and some unpleasant controversy with Rinehart over publishing rights, the novel was published in 1952 by Harcourt, Brace. Puzzling, misunderstood by many, considered by turns repulsive, dull, and precocious, Wise Blood marks the beginning of O’Connor’s mature work.
In the next three years, O’Connor published a number of short stories in magazines and literary journals. In 1955, Harcourt, Brace collected these into A Good Man Is Hard to Find, and Other Stories. The collection was greeted with critical acclaim. O’Connor’s stories were characterized as violent, grotesque, and outrageously funny. Although readers praised her keen ear for the rhythms of southern speech and her sharp eye for telling detail, many failed to appreciate or understand the orthodox Christianity that formed the foundation of her work.
In 1960, Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy published O’Connor’s third book and second novel, The Violent Bear It Away. Like Wise Blood, the novel is condensed, intense, and poetic. Clearly more mature in vision and artistry than her earlier novel, it brought mixed reviews from secular readers and greater appreciation from Christians.
While working on the stories that constituted her second collection, Everything That Rises Must Converge, O’Connor’s health began to fail. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux published the book in 1965, the year after O’Connor’s death from kidney failure. The book was highly praised.
Other writings published after her death reveal the many facets of her genius and enhance her literary reputation. In 1969, Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald gathered O’Connor’s lectures and miscellaneous nonfiction into Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. These writings, which are models of nonfiction prose style, provide insight into O’Connor’s views on art, religion, and education. Also included in the collection is the lengthy introduction O’Connor wrote to A Memoir of Mary Ann, the true story of a remarkable little girl who suffered facial disfigurement and terminal illness with dignity and grace.
Flannery O’Connor: The Complete Stories appeared in 1971. This collection of thirty-one pieces includes twelve previously uncollected stories. O’Connor’s first published story, “Geranium,” and her last, “Judgment Day,” a reworking of “Geranium,” provide a framework for the chronologically ordered collection. The book received the National Book Award in 1972.
The Habit of Being: Letters (1979), edited by Sally Fitzgerald, is an extensive collection of personal and professional letters spanning O’Connor’s adult life, from 1948 to 1964. These letters reveal something of the depth and details of O’Connor’s rich personality, her numerous personal and professional relationships, and her religious faith, as well as her wide-ranging reading, her linguistic playfulness, and her sense of humor. Her letters are essential reading for anyone who wants to understand O’Connor and her work.
In 1983, Leo J. Zuber compiled The Presence of Grace, and Other Book Reviews, a collection of the numerous book reviews O’Connor wrote for local publications. Collected Works, published by Literary Classics of the United States, appeared in 1988, thus firmly establishing O’Connor’s place in American literature.
Significance
Critics have variously labeled Flannery O’Connor a black humorist, a regionalist, a southern lady, and a Roman Catholic novelist. If she had to be labeled, she chose that of Christian realist. Working within the prevailing currents of prose fiction, O’Connor recognized her debt to such writers as Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Nathanael West, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. She profoundly interiorized her sense of place, the American South in which she was born and bred and whose idioms, cadences, and concerns she expressed. Her ultimate commitment was to what she might do with “the things of God” within the tradition of an orthodox Catholic faith. These three strands of her reality literature, the South, and Catholicism converged in her to produce a body of work that remains unique in American literature, in southern literature, in Catholic literature, and in feminist literature.
Although no one has yet emerged to attempt a similar synthesis, the years since O’Connor’s death have brought increasing appreciation, understanding, and valuing of her life and work. The future will surely recognize her significant contribution in at least three areas: the understanding of the human condition, the appreciation of the relationship between art and religion, and the valuing of women as writers. O’Connor’s clarity and depth of vision will continue to attract new generations of admirers. As artists continue to address in their work the problem of the relationship between art and belief, O’Connor’s “habit of art” will continue to evoke new depths of creativity. As women continue to claim their “true country” and their true voices, O’Connor’s commitment, integrity, and faith will continue to inspire in them a transformed “habit of being.”
Further Reading
Asals, Frederick. Flannery O’Connor: The Imagination of Extremity. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982. Asals finds that the power of O’Connor’s fiction springs from a passion for extremes, the tension of opposites. His work explores some of these tensions. As O’Connor’s work changed and developed, the focus of her imagination on extremes remained constant.
Cash, Jean W. Flannery O’Connor: A Life. University of Tennessee, 2002. A painstakingly researched portrait of O’Connor. Includes a bibliography and index.
Coles, Robert. Flannery O’Connor’s South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. Coles, a highly regarded social psychologist, draws on O’Connor’s letters and extensive interviews with southerners to discuss O’Connor’s social, religious, and intellectual milieu.
Elie, Paul. The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. Describes how four American Catholics O’Connor, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, and Walker Percy used their writing to explore questions of religious faith.
Fickett, Harold, and Douglas R. Gilbert. Flannery O’Connor: Images of Grace. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1986. This critical-biographical essay traces O’Connor’s artistic development and the treatment of sin and salvation in her writings. More than thirty photographs of O’Connor, including one self-portrait, and the people and places close to her illustrate the text.
Friedman, Melvin J., and Beverly L. Clark, eds. Critical Essays on Flannery O’Connor. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985. This collection includes representative reviews of most of O’Connor’s works, four of the most moving posthumous tributes, and a dozen outstanding critical essays, presented in the order of their first appearance. It concludes with a bibliography, annotated in depth, of diverse and innovative criticism intended for beginning as well as experienced readers of O’Connor.
Getz, Lorine M. Flannery O’Connor: Her Life, Library, and Book Reviews. New York: Mellen, 1980. This indispensable book for serious students of O’Connor includes perhaps the best chronological account of O’Connor’s life and work, a descriptive list of her personal library, and a list of her published book reviews.
McFarland, Dorothy T. Flannery O’Connor. Modern Literature Monographs. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1976. McFarland provides an excellent overview for undergraduate students, including a biographical sketch, contextual background, and brief but comprehensive discussions of O’Connor’s style, techniques, imagery, and major concepts.
Orvell, Miles. Invisible Parade: The Fiction of Flannery O’Connor. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1972. Orvell establishes several contexts for O’Connor’s works the South, Christianity, and literature and then examines individual works within those contexts. This book may provide a good orientation to O’Connor, especially for those who are uncomfortable with her religious beliefs.
Simpson, Melissa. Flannery O’Connor: A Biography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2005. Brief overview of O’Connor’s life and career, designed for high school students and college undergraduates. Includes time line and bibliography of additional resources about O’Connor.