Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O’Connor was an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist, born Mary Flannery O’Connor on March 25, 1925, in Savannah, Georgia. The only child of Edward Francis O’Connor, a real estate agent, and Regina Cline, she grew up in a Southern Catholic family of Irish descent. In 1940, her family moved to Milledgeville, Georgia. Her father had been diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus in 1937 and died in 1941. O’Connor and her mother remained in Milledgeville and later moved to Andalusia Farm, now a museum dedicated to her work.

O’Connor came of age as a writer through school newspapers, formal study, and a sharp visual sense. At Peabody High School, she worked as art editor of the school newspaper and graduated in 1942. She then entered Georgia State College for Women, now Georgia College & State University, in an accelerated three-year program, earning a B.A. in sociology and English literature in 1945. While there, she produced many cartoons for the student newspaper, and critics have said the unusual style and approach of those cartoons shaped her later fiction in important ways.

In 1945, O’Connor was accepted into the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she first planned to study journalism. She came into contact with writers and critics including Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Robie Macauley, Austin Warren, Andrew Lytle, and Paul Engle. Engle read and commented on early drafts of what became Wise Blood. She received an M.F.A. in 1947 and stayed another year on a fellowship. During this period she dropped the name Mary, which she said gave her the impression of an “Irish washwoman,” and became Flannery O’Connor.

O’Connor is best known for her short stories, though she also wrote two novels, 31 short stories, reviews, and commentaries. Her novels were Wise Blood (1952), later made into a film by John Huston, and The Violent Bear It Away (1960). Her story collections were A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge, published after her death in 1965. From 1956 through 1964, she also wrote more than one hundred book reviews for two Catholic diocesan newspapers in Georgia, The Bulletin and The Southern Cross.

Her fiction is often described as Southern Gothic: sardonic, regional, grotesque, and frequently violent. She wrote about morally flawed people, characters marked by disability or difference, and situations involving race, crime, religion, sanity, and human limitation. O’Connor’s Catholic faith was central to how she understood fiction. She said, “All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it,” though she knew many readers found the stories hard, hopeless, or brutal. For her, they were hard because “there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism.”

O’Connor died on August 3, 1964, but her work continued to find readers. Her Complete Stories, compiled after her death, won the 1972 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. Her sentences still carry force because they refuse easy comfort. They face human weakness, belief, violence, pride, and grace without softening them, and they do so in a voice that is exact, comic, severe, and alive to the strange pressure of the South she knew.