Flannery O'Connor

Mary Flannery O'Connor (March 25, 1925 – August 3, 1964) was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist.

She wrote two novels and 31 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries.

She was a Southern writer who often wrote in a sardonic Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters, often in violent situations.

The unsentimental acceptance or rejection of the limitations or imperfections or differences of these characters (whether attributed to disability, race, crime, religion or sanity) typically underpins the drama.

Her writing reflected her Roman Catholic faith and frequently examined questions of Catholicism-defined morality and ethics.

O'Connor was born on March 25, 1925, in Savannah, Georgia, the only child of Edward Francis O'Connor, a real estate agent, and Regina Cline, both of Irish descent.

As an adult, she remembered herself as a "pigeon-toed child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I'll-bite-you complex".

The Flannery O'Connor Childhood Home museum is located at 207 E. Charlton Street on Lafayette Square.

In 1940, O'Connor and her family moved to Milledgeville, Georgia, where they initially lived with her mother's family at the so-called 'Cline mansion', in town.

In 1937, her father was diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus; it led to his eventual death on February 1, 1941.

O'Connor and her mother continued to live in Milledgeville.

O'Connor attended Peabody High School, where she worked as the school newspaper's art editor and from which she graduated in 1942.

She entered Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College & State University) in an accelerated three-year program and graduated in June 1945 with a B.A. in sociology and English literature.

While at Georgia College, she produced a significant amount of cartoon work for the student newspaper.

Many critics have claimed that the idiosyncratic style and approach of these early cartoons shaped her later fiction in important ways.

In 1945, she was accepted into the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she first went to study journalism.

While there, she got to know several important writers and critics who lectured or taught in the program, among them Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Robie Macauley, Austin Warren and Andrew Lytle.

Lytle, for many years editor of the Sewanee Review, was one of the earliest admirers of her fiction.

He later published several of her stories in the Sewanee Review, as well as critical essays on her work.

Workshop director Paul Engle was the first to read and comment on the initial drafts of what would become Wise Blood.

Her writing career can be divided into four five-year periods of increasing skill and ambition, 1945 to 1964:

Regarding her emphasis of the grotesque, O'Connor said: "[A]nything 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, frequently interacting with people with disabilities or disabled themselves (as O'Connor was), while the issue of race often appears.

Most of her works feature disturbing elements, though she did not like to be characterized as cynical.

"I am mighty tired of reading reviews that call A Good Man brutal and sarcastic", she wrote.

"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."

She felt deeply informed by the sacramental and by the Thomist notion that the created world is charged with God.

Yet she did 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 received an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa in 1947.

She remained at the Iowa Writers' Workshop for another year after completing her degree on a fellowship.

During the summer of 1948, O'Connor continued to work on Wise Blood at Yaddo, an artists' community in Saratoga Springs, New York, where she also completed several short stories.

In 1949 O'Connor met and eventually accepted an invitation to stay with Robert Fitzgerald (a well-known translator of the classics) and his wife, Sally, in Ridgefield, Connecticut.

O'Connor is primarily known for her short stories.

In 1951, they moved to Andalusia Farm, which is now a museum dedicated to O'Connor's work.

O'Connor's two novels are Wise Blood (1952) (made into a film by John Huston) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960).

She also has had several books of her other writings published, and her enduring influence is attested by a growing body of scholarly studies of her work.

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".

She published two books of short stories: A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (published posthumously in 1965).

Many of O'Connor's short stories have been re-published in major anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories.

Her posthumously compiled Complete Stories won the 1972 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and has been the subject of enduring praise.