O'CONNOR, Flannery

(b. 25 March 1925 in Savannah, Georgia; d. 3 August 1964 in Milledgeville, Georgia), writer of bizarre novels and short stories focusing on the rural South and peopled with misfits and prophets, matriarchs and the maimed.

O'Connor was born Mary Flannery O'Connor; she dropped her first name for professional purposes. She was the only child of Edward Francis O'Connor, Jr., owner of a real estate business, and Regina L. Cline, a homemaker. When O'Connor was twelve, her father began to experience symptoms of disseminated lupus erythematosus, a fatal disease. The family moved into Regina O'Connor's family home in Milledgeville, Georgia. Witnessing her father's illness until he died in 1941 strengthened O'Connor's Roman Catholic faith. After graduating from high school in 1942, she enrolled in Georgia State College for Women (later Georgia College) in Milledgeville. Initially working on a degree in sociology, O'Connor shifted her focus to writing.

After graduating with a B.A. in 1945, O'Connor went to the Graduate School of Fine Arts at the University of Iowa, where she joined the Writer's Workshop. In 1946 she sold her first story, "The Geranium," to Accent magazine. During her second year at Iowa she was awarded the Rinehart Prize for part of what was to become her first novel, Wise Blood (1952). In June 1947 O'Connor received her M.F.A. in literature and accepted an invitation to Yaddo, a writer's colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. There she worked on Wise Blood, with different chapters published in Mademoiselle, Sewanee Review, and the Partisan Review. She also met lifelong friends. When her Yaddo friends Robert and Sally Fitzgerald moved to Ridgefield, Connecticut, in the summer of 1949, she moved in with them. O'Connor planned to stay in the North, but in late 1950, on her way home for Christmas, she became gravely ill. Doctors in Atlanta diagnosed her condition as lupus, the disease that had killed her father. O'Connor almost died, but the disease was arrested by massive injections of ACTH, a cortisone derivative.

It was not until the summer of 1951 that O'Connor was able to leave the hospital, too weak to climb stairs. O'Connor and her mother moved to Andalusia, the site of a dairy farm, a few miles outside Milledgeville. With her mother managing the farm, O'Connor went back to writing. When Wise Blood was published in 1952, it created a stir. Set in the rural South, it is a story of a quest for faith, full of dark comedy, violence, and religious symbolism. The characters are best described as grotesque. O'Connor's next book, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (1955), was critically acclaimed.

As a result of the massive doses of ACTH, O'Connor's bones were weakened to the extent that her hipbones could not support her weight, and she was forced to use aluminum crutches. Although it was difficult for her to get around, during the late 1950s and early 1960s O'Connor traveled to colleges and universities, lecturing to students and faculty and participating in symposia on writing. The lectures were informative and entertaining and covered a variety of topics. For example, "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction" discusses the function of the grotesque, a major feature of her writing. Her lectures were often explanations of her novels and stories given to a bemused public.

In 1958 she was persuaded to travel to Lourdes, France, to seek a miraculous cure for her disease. In a letter to the poet Elizabeth Bishop she wrote, "We went to Europe, … but my capacity for staying at home has now been perfected, sealed & is going to last me the rest of my life." Although O'Connor initially had left home to become a writer, being at home did not mean that she became a recluse. O'Connor had many visitors, and she corresponded continually with the famous and the not so famous. She was particularly generous with her time and advice for aspiring writers.

O'Connor's masterpiece, The Violent Bear It Away (1960), is the story of the initiation of a reluctant prophet. Again using a bizarre set of characters, the concept of a journey to find faith, and religious symbolism and violence, O'Connor shows that humans must destroy and suffer to find themselves. The novel focuses on Protestant fundamentalism, appropriate because the author is from the Bible Belt but unusual since she is a Roman Catholic. O'Connor explained in one of her lectures that Protestants are in closer contact with God without the mediation of the church and, therefore, subject to more intensity. Although the hero, a young adolescent, tries to fight his fate, it overtakes him. The hardships of his journey, which include experiencing death, committing murder, and being raped, cause him to be reborn into the life of the spirit.

In early 1964, while at work on a third novel, O'Connor had an abdominal tumor removed. It was benign, but the procedure reactivated the lupus, and her kidneys were affected. O'Connor knew that she was dying and discontinued the novel. (A fragment of it, entitled "Why Do the Heathens Rage?" had been published in Esquire in 1963.) She focused instead on finishing enough short stories for another book. O'Connor slipped into a coma and died of kidney failure in Milledgeville. She is buried in Memory Hill Cemetery there. Everything That Rises Must Converge was published posthumously in 1965. As in her previous work, the setting and subject are of the contemporary South, and social issues are part of the fabric of the stories. In the title story, the serious subject of integration has moments of high comedy when a white woman, indignant at the presence of a black woman sitting opposite her on a bus, realizes that both of them are wearing the same hat. Although O'Connor believed in integration and recognized the plight of blacks in the South, she was reluctant to criticize her community openly.

"Revelation" is another story that alludes to social issues. Here, a self-righteous matriarch busies herself placing people into social classes until a college student, home from Wellesley College, throws a book at her, tries to strangle her, and calls her a pig. Violence leads to revelation. The final story in the volume, "Judgement Day," is a reworking of an old story first written at Iowa in 1946, and the subject of death and symbolic resurrection is particularly poignant as the dying author labored to complete her work.

Although O'Connor did not publish a large number of books, she became a major figure in the literary world. Her writing was critically acclaimed and translated into a dozen languages. Writing about the rural South in a contemporary time frame, O'Connor's focus on the spiritual condition of modern humanity has a universal appeal. She detected an attitude of smugness and self-righteousness in people that she believed needed to be changed. In addition, the deeply religious O'Connor saw the shallow complacency of an increasingly highly rationalized and technological society and felt people's need to rediscover faith. But O'Connor rejected a return to the past. There was no desire to hark back to the Old South and its traditions. Those characters who yearned to return to so-called better days usually provoke some type of death or destruction. To urge her readers toward new insight, O'Connor used humor, violence, and the grotesque. She juxtaposed comedy and murder, the intensity of belief with the despair of those who had no faith. Her techniques often upset readers, but to be disturbed and repulsed can lead people to view their world in new ways.

O'Connor's papers are at the Georgia College Library in Milledgeville. Her lectures and essays are collected in Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, eds., Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (1969). Sally Fitzgerald selected and edited the Letters of Flannery O'Connor: The Habit of Being (1979). Numerous studies of O'Connor have biographical material and criticism of her work, including Stanley Edgar Hyman, "Flannery O'Connor," in Seven American Women Writers of the Twentieth Century: An Introduction (1963); James A. Grimshaw, Jr., The Flannery O'Connor Companion (1981); Jill P. Baumgaertner, Flannery O'Connor: A Proper Scaring (1988); and Richard Giannone, Flannery O'Connor, Hermit Novelist (2000). An obituary is in the New York Times (4 Aug. 1964).

Marcia B. Dinneen