Flannery OConnor

Flannery O'Connor (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). 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, her fiction treats contemporary Southern life in terms of stark, brutal comedy and violent tragedy. 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 was the victim of a type 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. She died in 1964 at 39.

Bibliography: See her Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, ed. by S. and R. Fitzgerald (1969); her letters, ed. by S. Fitzgerald, The Habit of Being (1979); studies by J. Hendin (1970) and K. Feeley (1972, 2d ed. 1982), S. Paulsen (1988), R. Giannone (1989), and B. Ragen (1989).

O'Connor, Flannery (1925–64), American novelist and short story writer, born in Georgia, whose works may be described as examples of Southern Gothic. They include Wise Blood (1952), The Violent Bear It Away (1960), and The Complete Stories (1971).

O'Connor, Flannery (1925–64),Georgia author, whose Gothic novels are Wise Blood (1952), about a young religious fanatic who tries to establish a Church Without Christ in his Georgia mountain region; and The Violent Bear It Away (1960), a macabre tale set in the backwoods of Georgia and presenting the fanatical mission of a boy intent on baptizing a still younger boy. Her stories, set in the South and also grotesque, are collected in A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955, titled The Artificial Nigger in England), Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965), and Complete Stories (1971). Occasional prose was collected as Mystery and Manners (1969) and letters as The Habit of Being (1979). O'Connor represents a combination unique in modern American fiction: a writer deeply religious exploring the conflict between the sacred and the profane, and sometimes their merger, in a grittily regional setting. Her most memorable stories, Good Country People, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, and the title story in Everything That Rises Must Converge, are haunting, comic, and realistic depictions of the struggle of souls to know themselves, to escape evil, and to reach God. Most of her fiction is printed in a Library of America edition; she is the only author of her generation to be thus honored.