Flannery O’Connor

1925-1964

American Fiction Writer

 

Page created by Jolly Sharp.

 

O'Connor's subject in fiction, she once said, was "the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil. I have also found that what I write is read by an audience which puts little stock in either grace or the devil." “When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock, to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind, you draw large and startling figures.” "Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological."
“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.” “I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.”

WWW links:

The Flannery O'Connor Collection

Andalusia Foundation

Brief Biography

Sojourners Magazine

Teilhard de Chardin

Major Works:

Wise Blood (1952)

A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955)

The Violent Bear It Away (1960)

Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965)

Mystery and Manners (1969)

The Complete Short Stories (1971)

The Habit of Being (1979)

Mary Flannery O’Connor was born March 25, 1925, in Savannah, Georgia, to Edward Francis and Regina Cline O’Connor.  From an early age and throughout her life, she loved eccentric, noisy birds.  In “The King of the Birds,” O’Connor shares the story of her chicken that could walk backward and her fascination with peacocks.  The eerie sounds and the religious implications of the peacock reverberate in her fiction.  When O’Connor was twelve, she and her family moved to her mother’s home town of Milledgeville, Georgia, where she attended local schools, including the Georgia State College for Women.  While at college, she worked on both the newspaper and yearbook staffs, writing and editing text plus contributing cartoons.  Even though she was interested in writing, her degree was not in English but in Social Sciences.  After receiving her BA in 1945, she began the Writer’s Workshop program at the University of Iowa, earning her Master of Fine Arts in Literature two years later.

Being a Roman Catholic and a Southerner were two major influences in O’Connor’s life, as is evident in many of her stories, essays, novels, and letters.  However, she did spend a short time at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, New York, after leaving the University of Iowa.  While in New York, she met other writers and critics who influenced her life and career, especially Sally and Robert Fitzgerald who later collected, edited and published many of her unpublished works.  Unfortunately, while in New York, O’Connor discovered that she had the same disease that killed her father, lupus.  Returning to Milledgeville and the assistance of her mother, O’Connor’s life revolved around her writing, with occasion lecturing excursions.  She died on August 3, 1964, at the age of 39.

O’Connor’s major works include two novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960), and two short story collections, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965).  However, to receive a fuller picture of O’Connor’s personality, dreams, and writing purposes, one should examine some of her posthumously published works, as well.  Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (1969) contains essays, lectures, and critical articles by O’Connor that the Fitzgeralds collect from various publications and even unpublished prose.  The Habit of Being: Letters (1979) and The Correspondence of Flannery O’Connor and the Brainard Cheneys (1986) allow readers to follow comments shared with her friends and even acquaintances during the progress of her illness and her writing.

Works Consulted

Jensen, Susan.  “Classic Authors: Flannery O’Connor.”  24 Aug. 1999. http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/classic_24579.

O’Connor, Flannery.  Mystery and Manners.  Ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald.  New York: Noonday, 1957.