Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964). Biography and Creativity

Mary Flannery O’Connor, the only child of Edward Francis and Regina Cline O’Connor, was born in Savannah, Georgia, on March 25, 1925. For 12 years Flannery O’Connor’s imagination formed in this city steeped in southern tradition, a city of blossoming magnolias, soaring oaks, hanging moss, public parks, monuments, and the impressive Cathedral of St. John the Baptist. Savannah’s Roman Catholic community nurtured the young Flannery, who, growing up with devout parents, developed a strong faith in her early years, a faith to which she held dearly for the rest of her life and upon which she reflected in her fiction, essays, reviews, and lectures.

Influenced by Savannah’s historical culture and educated in parochial schools, O’Connor developed an appreciation for southern culture and a disciplined, educated mind. Despite her relatively sheltered childhood, her artistic vision grew to embrace universal humanity, which she depicted through a regional lens and in a grotesque “southern gothic” style.

In early 1938, after he was diagnosed with lupus, the autoimmune disease from which he would die just three years later, Edward Francis O’Connor took a job with the Federal Housing Administration in Atlanta. Regina and Flannery stayed in Atlanta for only one year, long enough for Flannery to complete seventh grade at a parochial school. At the end of the school term Flannery and her mother moved to the small Georgia town of Milledgeville to live in the Cline home, her mother’s birthplace and home to the family since before the Civil War. O’Connor’s father remained in Atlanta during the week and traveled to Milledgeville on weekends.

Although the O’Connor family remained members of a close-knit Catholic community, Milledgeville exposed O’Connor to rural southern culture and to Protestant Christianity. O’Connor excelled at Peabody High School, a public school, where she wrote and illustrated books in her spare time. O’Connor graduated the year after her father died and enrolled in what is now Georgia College and State University (then the Georgia State College for Women), where she majored in English and social science. She edited the school newspaper, the yearbook, and the literary quarterly, the Corinthian. During this time she submitted cartoons to the New Yorker, which, despite giving her strong encouragement, never published her work.

O’Connor’s many successes at the Georgia State College for Women convinced her to take up writing as a profession. In fall 1945, at the encouragement of her philosophy professor, George Beiswanger, O’Connor submitted writing she had done for the Corinthian and was awarded a Rinehart Fellowship at the Iowa School for Writers. While it is now common to study creative writing in graduate school, it was not in 1945. The Iowa School for Writers was one of the first such programs in the United States; for 20 years the school had allowed students to submit creative work for master’s degrees. O’Connor’s thesis, “The Geranium: A Collection of Short Stories” (1947), contained six works.

Of these, “The Geranium” was published in the summer 1946 issue of Accent. During her stay at Iowa, O’Connor met and received advice from a number of visiting authors, including John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, and Allen Tate, whose first wife, Caroline Gordon, became O’Connor’s mentor, later guiding her as she wrote the first of her two novels, Wise Blood (1952), which O’Connor began at the Yaddo Artist Colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. She stayed there after graduation from Iowa and then lived briefly in New York City.

In February 1949 Robert Lowell introduced her to Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. The Fitzgeralds, who shared her Catholic faith, became two of O’Connor’s closest friends; they provided a refuge for O’Connor to work in their Connecticut home. Robert Fitzgerald, whose translations of Homer, Virgil, and Sophocles remain among the finest in English, introduced O’Connor to many works of literature and endowed her with an appreciation for the great works of antiquity, especially Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. For the rest of her life she corresponded with the Fitzgeralds. After O’Connor’s death, Robert served as O’Connor’s literary executor and published Mystery and Manners (1969), a collection of O’Connor’s lectures and magazine articles. After Robert died, Sally collected many of O’Connor’s letters in The Habit of Being (1979). She also edited material for O’Connor’s Collected Works (1988) and lectured on O’Connor’s life and writings.

In 1949 O’Connor’s health began to deteriorate. That same year she traveled to Milledgeville for kidney surgery. She returned briefly to Connecticut, where she completed a draft of Wise Blood but became desperately ill on a return train trip to Milledgeville in December 1950. At that time, O’Connor was diagnosed with lupus, the disease that had claimed her father’s life some 10 years before. Systemic lupus erythematosus is a chronic immune disease in which a person’s immune system attacks the body’s healthy tissue, causing inflammation throughout the body, damage to internal organs, and persistent pain. Upon receiving the diagnosis, O’Connor returned to Milledgeville and moved with her mother to a dairy farm they called “Andalusia.” Although O’Connor continued to work until the time of her death in 1964, she never permanently left the farm.

Four chapters of Wise Blood were published in Mademoiselle, the Sewanee Review, and the Partisan R.eview in 1948 and 1949; the complete work appeared in print in 1952. Often compared with William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses for its depiction of regional characters and compared with Nathaniel West’s Miss Lonelyhearts for its grotesque, darkly comic qualities and spiritual subject matter, Wise Blood received unsympathetic criticism. Most reviewers complained that the novel’s strange plot and bizarre characters were difficult to understand. Nevertheless, soon after Wise Blood^,s publication, O’Connor began to work on another novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960).

O’Connor took the title from the Douay translation of Matthew 11:12 in the Bible: “From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suf- fereth violence, and the violent bear it away.” As do Wise Blood and many of her short stories, The Violent Bear It Away contained violence leading to spiritual awakenings. Partly because of her physical limitations and partly because of the difficulty of taking on another novel, O’Connor returned to writing stories. Between fall 1952 and mid-1955, she labored on A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955), a collection of 10 stories, many of which—the title piece, “The Displaced Person,” “The Artificial Nigger,” and “Good Country People”—critics maintain are among her finest writing.

At Andalusia, O’Connor lived a simple life, writing two to three hours every morning, eating with her mother, writing letters, and watching the farm animals, including her pet peacocks. She did make several short trips, delivering public readings of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and lecturing at such respected institutions as Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, and the University of Chicago. She also made pilgrimages to Lourdes and to Rome, where, in May 1958, she had an audience with Pope Pius XII.

Throughout her struggle with lupus, O’Connor received massive doses of cortisone. While the treatments enabled her to function, they also weakened her bones. By fall 1953 her hip joints had become so weak that she had to use crutches. Fighting lupus and increasingly concerned about the negative reviews she received, O’Connor wrote darker tales. She also became further disillusioned about modern society, which she considered as fallen. Despite what was for all practical purposes a long bout with depression, she held fast to the Catholic faith and, especially during her final years, read and reviewed theological texts, most notably those of the French priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

In a 1960 book review O’Connor called Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man (1959) the most important book published in the last three decades. Teilhard de Chardin envisioned a divine center of convergence, a conception of spiritual evolution at work in history. O’Connor drew upon his ideas when compiling the posthumously published Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965), which included, in addition to the title story, “The Enduring Chill,” “Revelation,” “Greenleaf,” and “The Lame Shall Enter First.” The characters in these stories, in one way or another, resist convergence, the pull of God’s grace. Yet, many of the characters have a chance at redemption after their false selves have been stripped away, often in dramatic, violent scenes.

Throughout her works O’Connor focused on religious themes and often depicted life in the largely Protestant South. Pinning down O’Connor’s specific theological stance, however, is difficult to do. Her ironic, grotesque, and violent texts, which capture a time of social unrest and radical change in southern culture, do not yield easy interpretations and are not easily reduced to a specific theology. O’Connor had little patience with religious dogmatism yet often created evangelical Protestant characters who, like her, were filled with a burning desire for transcendence.

O’Connor remains not only one of the most significant figures in modern southern fiction but also one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Her short stories are considered models of the art form. Because of her use of grotesque or “southern gothic” style, which she achieved by blending the humorous and the horrible, the absurd and the tragic, her works present challenging paradoxes. She is known for her religious thinking, which has tempted many to read her works as Christian allegories, and for her comic vision, often presented through everyday characters, dramatic irony, a playful tone, and absurd situations. O’Connor’s representation of African Americans and of racial conflicts during the civil rights era have sparked critical controversy.

Alice Walker, for example, expressed her critical reservations and ambivalent feeling about O’Connor in “Beyond the Peacock: The Reconstruction of Flannery O’Connor” (In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens 1983). Walker, after critiquing O’Connor’s letters and personal statements, was disturbed by O’Connor’s use of racist language and her lack of explicit statements on racial injustice. Nevertheless, Walker concedes that the “essential O’Connor is not about race at all, which is why it is so refreshing, coming, as it does, out of such a racial culture” (53). Ultimately Walker concludes that “whether one ‘understands’ [O’Connor’s] fiction or not, one knows that her characters are new and wondrous creations in the world and that not one of her stories . . . could have been written by anyone else” (56).

Despite having written relatively little—two novels, two collections of short stories, and a few occasional pieces of nonfiction—O’Connor crafted language of such originality that her works continue to be read and studied. If, as Harold Bloom has said, one of the hallmarks of great literature is its “strangeness,” then few other American writers have created such a bizarre collection of works. With a sharp eye for detail, a keen ability to depict common humanity, and a wildly comic imagination, O’Connor rendered what she called “the Christ-haunted South.” Filled with religious fervor and the ability to record the region’s oddities—its exaggerations, its dialects, its resistance to change, its social contradictions, its contentious race relations—O’Connor captured the South at a time of radical change.

The portrait she paints could only have been created by one of the country’s master parodists. In 39 short years, Flannery created unforgettable characters and masterfully crafted short stories, earning her a permanent place in the American literary canon.