Flannery O'Connor

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Flannery O'Connor

O'Connor, Flannery (Mary Flannery O'Connor), 1925-64, American author, b. Savannah, Ga., grad. Women's College of Georgia (A.B., 1945), Iowa State Univ. (M.F.A., 1947). Her characters, although often deformed in both body and spirit, are impelled toward redemption. All of O'Connor's fiction reflects her strong Roman Catholic faith. Wise Blood(1952) and The Violent Bear It Away(1960) are novels focusing on religious fanaticism; A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge(1965) are short-story collections. Her Collected Stories was published in 1971. O'Connor had a form of lupus and spent the last ten years of her life as an invalid, writing and raising peacocks on her mother's farm near Milledgeville, Ga.

When Flannery O’Connor was 5 years old, she purportedly taught h er pet bantam chicken to walk backward. The stunt attracted the attention of the Pathe newsreel company, and a Yankee cameraman was dispatched to her family’s backyard in Savannah, Ga., to document the trick. O’Connor never saw the humorous short, though it was screened in many movie theaters across America in 1932. Yet years later in an essay in Holiday magazine, she claimed the unlikely event “marked me for life.”

By the time she was wrote that 1961 essay, “The King of the Birds,” O’Connor was a cult literary celebrity. She had published two novels –“Wise Blood” (1952) and “The Violent Bear It Away” (1960)--as well as the collection of stories –“A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (1955) -- that truly put her on the map. The O’Connor family’s

antebellum home in Milledgeville, Ga., was featured in Newsweek; a quasi- glamorous portrait appeared in Harper’s Bazaar; her work was excerpted in Vogue. She used her freakish chicken as a pretext to meditate on her uneasy relation to fame and popular culture, claiming that all the attention made her feel like a cross between “Roy Rogers’s horse and Miss Watermelon of 1955.”

Dying in 1964 of lupus at age 39, unmarried, having lived mostly on a dairy farm with her mother, O’Connor’s life and work might then have been expecte d to fade from memory. She swore there would be no biographies as “lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.” Yet The New York Times deemed a story in her collection, “Everything That Rises Must Converge,’’ published eig ht months after her death, among “the few masterpieces of the form in English;” her “Complete Stories’’ won a posthumous 1972 National Book Award; she was the first postwar American woman author in the canonic Library of America; the phrase “like something out of Flannery O’Connor” entered our language as shorthand for nailing many a funny, dark, askew moment. Like her backward chicken, O’Connor’s fiction continues to fascinate by running counter to much trendy literary culture.

Follows are some of her works:

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Wise Blood. The first of O'Connor's two novels concerns a zealot who founds the Church of Christ Without Christ, then blinds and tortures himself after killing a false prophet of his church. O'Connor nonetheless refers to her work as a "comic novel." A Georgia native, O'Connor began her writing career publishing short stories, most of which were completed as part of her master's thesis at the University of Iowa.

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A Good Man Is Hard to Find, and Other Stories. The first of O'Connor's two story collections, which help redefine the short story in the postwar period, includes acclaimed works such as "Good Country People," "The Artificial Nigger," "The Displaced Person," and the title story, perhaps her most famous

and notorious work, concerning the encounter between an insufferable Southern family and a homicidal psychopath named The Misfit, who becomes an agent of spiritual redemption.

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The Violent Bear It Away. O'Connor's second and final novel concerns the efforts of a backwoods prophet, Francis Marion Tarwater, to escape his calling. The book is an elaborate, symbolic treatment of the soul's tortuous struggle for faith, drawing on the author's characteristic Southern grotesque elements.

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Everything That Rises Must Converge. O'Connor's second, posthumously published story collection contains two of her greatest stories, "Judgment Day" and "Parker's Back." Her Complete Stories would be issued in 1971.

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Mystery and Manners. This posthumously published collection of lectures and essays contains O'Connor's fullest explication of her works, creative process, and artistic vision.

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Complete Stories. The volume adds to O'Connor's previously collected works her first published story, "The Geranium," and several other early works. It receives the National Book Award and substantiates O'Connor's reputation as one of the American masters of short fiction.

As a writer, O'Connor is highly regarded for her bizarre imagination, uncompromising moral vision, and superb literary style. Combining the grotesque and the gothic and touched by mordant wit, her fiction treats 20th-century Southern life in terms of stark, brutal comedy and violent tragedy.

Regarding her emphasis of the grotesque, O'Connor said: "anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic."Her texts usually take place in the South and revolve around morally flawed characters, while the issue of race

often appears in the background. One of her trademarks is foreshadowing, giving a reader an idea of what will happen far before it happens. Most of her works feature disturbing elements, though she did not like to be characterized as cynical. "I am tired of reading reviews that call A Good Man brutal and sarcastic," she writes. "The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism... when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror."

Her two novels were Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away(1960). She also published two books of short stories: A Good Man Is Hard to Find(1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (published posthumously in 1965).

She felt deeply informed by the sacramental, and by the Thomist notion that the created world is charged with God. Yet she would not write apologetic fiction of the kind prevalent in the Catholic literature of the time, explaining that a writer's meaning must be evident in his or her fiction without didacticism. She wrote ironic, subtly allegorical fiction about deceptively backward Southern characters, usually fundamentalist Protestants, who undergo transformations of character that to O'Connor's thinking brought them closer to the Catholic mind. The transformation is often accomplished through pain, violence, and ludicrous behavior in the pursuit of the holy. However grotesque the setting, she tried to portray her characters as they might be touched by divine grace. This ruled out a sentimental understanding of the stories' violence, as of her own illness. O'Connor wrote: "Grace changes us and change is painful." She also had a deeply sardonic sense of humor, often based in the disparity between her characters' limited perceptions and the awesome fate awaiting them. Another source of humor is frequently found in the attempt of well-meaning liberals to cope with the rural South on their own terms. O'Connor uses such characters' inability to come to terms with race, poverty, and fundamentalism, other than in sentimental illusions, as an example of the failure of the secular world in the twentieth century.

However, several stories reveal that O'Connor was familiar with some of the most sensitive contemporary issues that her liberal and fundamentalist characters might encounter. She addressed the Holocaust in her famous story "The Displaced Person," and racial integration in "Everything that Rises Must Converge." O'Connor's fiction often included references to the problem of race in the South; occasionally, racial issues come to the forefront, as in "The Artificial Nigger," "Everything that Rises Must Converge," and "Judgment Day," her last short story and a drastically rewritten version of her first published story, "The Geranium." Fragments exist of an unfinished novel tentatively titled Why Do the Heathen Rage? that draws from several of her short stories, including "Why Do the Heathen Rage?," "The Enduring Chill," and "The Partridge Festival."

Her best friend, Betty Hester, received a weekly letter from O'Connor for more than a decade. These letters provided the bulk of the correspondence collected in The Habit of Being, a selection of O'Connor's letters edited by Sally Fitzgerald. The reclusive Hester was given the pseudonym "A.," and her identity was not known until after she killed herself in 1998. Much of O'Connor's best-known writing on religion, writing, and the South is contained in these and other letters, including letters written to her friends Brainard Cheney and Samuel Ashley Brown. The complete collection of the unedited letters between O'Connor and Hester was unveiled by Emory University on May 12, 2007; the letters were given to the university in 1987 with the stipulation that they not be released to the public for 20 years.

An American writer who concentrated her literary efforts on exposing the spiritually damnable and damned in society, Flannery O'Connor set her comic-tragic Gothic landscapes in the decaying world of the Old South. Although she was far less prolific a writer than contemporary southern revelationists Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty, she nonetheless earned a prominent place in literary history. Her 31 short stories and two novels are today considered American classics.

The Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, named in honor of O'Connor by the University of Georgia Press, is a prize given annually to an outstanding collection of short stories.