Flannery O'Connor
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| Born: | March 25, 1925 Savannah, Georgia |
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| Died: | August 3, 1964 |
| Occupation: | Novelist, short story writer |
| Genres: | Southern Gothic |
Mary Flannery O'Connor (b. March 25, 1925, Savannah, Georgia – d. August 3, 1964, Baldwin County, Georgia) was an American author.
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[edit] Biography
Flannery O'Connor was the only child of Edward F. O'Connor and Regina Cline O’Connor. Her father was diagnosed with lupus in 1937; he died on February 1, 1941. The disease was hereditary in the O'Connor family. Flannery was devastated, and almost never spoke of him in later years.
Flannery described herself as a "pigeon-toed only child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I'll-bite-you complex." When O'Connor was five her aunt gave her a chicken that could walk backwards, and it was this that led to her first experience of being a celebrity. The Pathé News people filmed "Little Mary O'Connor" with her trained chicken, and showed the film around the country. She said, "That was the most exciting thing that ever happened to me. It's all been downhill from there."
O'Connor attended the Peabody Laboratory School, from which she graduated in 1942. She entered Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College & State University), where she majored in English and Sociology (the latter a perspective she satirized effectively in novels such as The Violent Bear It Away). In 1946 Flannery O'Connor was accepted into the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop.
In 1949 O'Connor met and eventually accepted an invitation to stay with Robert Fitzgerald (translator of Greek plays and epic poems, including Oedipus Rex and both the Odyssey and the Iliad, and also a respected poet in his own right) and his wife, Sally, in Redding, Connecticut.[1]
In 1951 she was diagnosed with disseminated lupus, and subsequently returned to her ancestral farm (see Andalusia) in Milledgeville. There she raised and nurtured some 100 peafowl. Fascinated by birds of all kinds, she raised ducks, hens, geese, and any sort of exotic bird she could obtain, as well as incorporating images of peacocks often in her books. She describes her peacocks in one essay. Despite her sheltered life, her writing reveals an uncanny grasp of the nuances of human behavior. She was a deeply devout Catholic, living in the mostly Protestant American South. She collected books on Catholic theology and at times gave lectures on faith and literature, traveling quite far despite her frail health. She also had a wide correspondence, including such famous writers as Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. She never married, relying for companionship on her correspondence and on her close relationship with her mother.
She died on August 3, 1964, age 39, of complications from lupus at Baldwin County Hospital and was buried in Milledgeville, Georgia. Regina Cline O'Connor outlived her daughter by many years, dying in 1997 at the age of 99.
[edit] Career
An important voice in American literature, O'Connor wrote two novels and 31 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. She was a Southern writer in the vein of William Faulkner, often writing in a Southern Gothic style and relying heavily on regional settings and -- it is regularly said -- grotesque characters. However, she remarked "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" (Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose 40). Her texts often take place in the South and revolve around morally flawed characters, while the issue of race looms in the background. One of her trademarks is unsubtle foreshadowing, giving a reader an idea of what will happen far before it happens. Finally, she brands each work with a disturbing and ironic conclusion.
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 and Other Stories (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (published posthumously in 1965).
A life-long Roman Catholic, her writing is 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 was aware of the Holocaust, touching on it closely in one famous story, "The Displaced Person." Integration comes up in "Everything that Rises Must Converge," and O'Connor's fiction became more and more concerned with race as she neared the end of her life.
Her best friend, Betty Hester, received a weekly letter from O'Connor for over a decade. These letters provided the bulk of the correspondence collected in The Habit of Being, a selection of O'Connor's letters that was edited by Sally Fitzgerald. The reclusive Hester was given the pseudonym "A.," and her identity was not known until she died in 1998. Much of O'Connor's best-known writing on religion, writing, and the South is contained in these and other letters.
The Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, named in honor of O'Connor, is a prize given annually to an outstanding collection of short stories.
[edit] Bibliography
- Wise Blood, 1952
- The Life You Save May Be Your Own, 1953
- A Good Man Is Hard To Find, 1955
- The Violent Bear It Away, 1960
- A Memoir of Mary Ann (Editor and author of introduction), 1962
- Everything That Rises Must Converge, 1965
- Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, Edited by Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald, 1969
- The Habit of Being: Letters, Edited by Sally Fitzgerald, 1979
- The Presence of Grace and Other Book Reviews, Edited by Carter W. Martin, 1983
Compilations:
- Three by Flannery O'Connor (contains Wise Blood, A Good Man Is Hard To Find, and The Violent Bear It Away), 1964
- Three by Flannery O'Connor (contains Wise Blood, The Violent Bear It Away and Everything That Rises Must Converge), 1983
- The Complete Short Stories, 1971
- Collected Works (contains Wise Blood, A Good Man Is Hard To Find, The Violent Bear It Away, and Everything That Rises Must Converge), edited by Sally Fitzgerald, 1988
Unfinished Works:
- 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."
[edit] Other facts
- Her father died from lupus when she was 15.
- She herself was diagnosed with lupus. She was only expected to live five more years; she lived nearly 15.
- She completed over two dozen short stories and two novels while lupus ravaged her body.
- The last story she published before dying was called "Judgement Day", which was a drastically rewritten version of her first published story, titled "The Geranium".
[edit] Footnotes
- ^ Various sources incorrectly cite Ridgefield, Connecticut as Fitzgerald's home from the 1940s into the 1960s. He, in fact, lived on Seventy Acres Road in the adjacent town of Redding, Connecticut. He and Flannery O'Connor used a Ridgefield mailing address on their correspondence because, in those days, rural delivery to that portion of Redding was done by the Ridgefield post office. This has been confirmed by articles that have appeared in The Redding Pilot, the local newspaper, as well as searches through Ridgefield and Redding records.
[edit] External links
- Literary Encyclopedia biography
- Biography
- PAL
- O'Connor's home in Milledgeville, Georgia
- Flannery O'Connor Frequently Asked Questions
- Flannery O'Connor: Heaven Suffereth Violence
- Flannery O'Connor Collection at the Georgia College & State University
- Flannery O'Connor in Georgia
- Everything That Rises Must Converge at Flannery ToxicUniverse.com article by David Abrams
- Reading Between the Lines Ragged Edge Magazine article by Louise Norlie
- Presenting Disability and Illness Disability Studies Quarterly article by Nicole Markotic
- Who's Afraid of Flannery O'Connor? Credenda article by Douglas Jones
- Summary of "Good Country People"
- In Search of Flannery O'Connor New York Times travel article by Lawrence Downes, February 4, 2007
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| NAME | O'Connor, Flannery |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | O'Connor, Mary Flannery |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | American novelist, short story writer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 25, 1925 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Savannah, Georgia |
| DATE OF DEATH | August 3, 1964 |
| PLACE OF DEATH | |
