Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor
Born Mary Flannery O'Connor
(1925-03-25)March 25, 1925
Savannah, Georgia, US
Died August 3, 1964(1964-08-03) (aged 39)
Milledgeville, Baldwin County, Georgia, US
Occupation Novelist, short story writer, essayist
Period 1946–65
Genre Southern Gothic
Subject Morality, Catholicism, grace, transcendence
Literary movement Christian Realism
Notable works Wise Blood, The Violent Bear It Away, A Good Man Is Hard to Find

Mary Flannery O'Connor (March 25, 1925 – August 3, 1964) was an American writer and essayist. An important voice in American literature, she wrote two novels and 32 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. She was a Southern writer who often wrote in a Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters. Her writing also reflected her own Roman Catholic faith, and frequently examined questions of morality and ethics.

O'Connor's Complete Stories won the 1972 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction[1] and was named the "Best of the National Book Awards" by Internet visitors in 2009.[lower-alpha 1] O'Connor was the first writer born in the twentieth century to have her works collected and published in the Library of America.

Early years and education

O'Connor was born on March 25, 1925, in Savannah, Georgia, the only child of Edward F. O'Connor, a real estate agent,[2] and Regina Cline. She described herself as a "pigeon-toed child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I'll-bite-you complex."[3] When she was six, living at a home still standing, she experienced her first brush with celebrity status. The Pathé News people filmed "Little Mary O'Connor" with her trained chicken,[4] and showed the film around the country. She said, "When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathé News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been an anticlimax."[5] O'Connor and her family moved to Milledgeville, Georgia in 1940 to live on Andalusia Farm, which is now a museum dedicated to O'Connor's work.[6] In 1937, her father was diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus. It led to his eventual death on February 1, 1941, and O'Connor and her mother continued to live in Milledgeville[7]

Flannery O'Connor with Arthur Koestler (left) and Robie Macauley on a visit to the Amana Colonies in 1947. Photo by C. Cameron Macauley.

O'Connor attended Peabody High School, where she worked as the school newspaper's art editor and from which she graduated in 1942.[8] 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 Social sciences degree. While at Georgia State College for Women, she produced a significant amount of cartoon work for the student newspaper.[9] In 1946, 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. 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.[10]

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 Redding, Connecticut.[lower-alpha 2]

Career

Regarding her emphasis of the grotesque, O'Connor said: "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."[11] Her texts usually take place in the South and revolve around morally flawed characters, while the issue of race often appears in the background. Most of her works feature disturbing elements, though she did not like to be characterized as cynical. "I am tired of reading reviews that call A Good Man brutal and sarcastic," she writes. "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."[12]

O'Connor's 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 (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (published posthumously in 1965).

Flannery O'Connor's childhood home in Savannah, Georgia

Many of her short stories have also been published in major anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories[13].

She felt 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 her 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. She 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 addressed the Holocaust in her famous story "The Displaced Person," and racial integration in "Everything That Rises Must Converge." Her fiction often included references to the problem of race in the South; occasionally, racial issues come to the forefront, as in "The Artificial Nigger," "Everything that Rises Must Converge," and "Judgment Day," her last short story and a drastically rewritten version of her first published story, "The Geranium." 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."

Deteriorating health and death

Andalusia Farm near Milledgeville, where O'Connor wrote many of her works

In 1951, O'Connor was diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus (lupus), like her father, and subsequently returned to her ancestral farm, Andalusia, in Milledgeville, Georgia. Although expected to live only five more years, she managed fourteen. At Andalusia, she raised and nurtured some 100 peafowl. Fascinated by birds of all kinds, she raised ducks, ostrich, emus, toucans, and any sort of exotic bird she could obtain, while incorporating images of peacocks into her books. She describes her peacocks in an essay entitled "The King of the Birds." Despite her sheltered life, her writing reveals an uncanny grasp of the nuances of human behavior. She was a devout Catholic despite living in the "Bible Belt," the Protestant 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 maintained a wide correspondence, including such famous writers as Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. She never married, relying for companionship on her correspondence and close relationship with her mother.

O'Connor completed more than two dozen short stories and two novels while battling lupus. She died on August 3, 1964, at the age of 39, of complications from a new attack of lupus following surgery for fibroma, at Baldwin County Hospital and was buried in Milledgeville, Georgia, at Memory Hill Cemetery.[14]

A Catholic life

From 1956 through 1964, O'Connor wrote more than one hundred book reviews for two Catholic diocesan newspapers in Georgia: The Bulletin, and The Southern Cross. According to fellow reviewer Joey Zuber, the wide range of books she chose to review demonstrated that she was profoundly intellectual. Her reviews consistently confront theological and ethical themes in books written by the most serious and demanding theologians of her time.[15] Professor of English Carter Martin, an authority on O'Connor's writings, notes simply that her "book reviews are at one with her religious life".[16]

Works

Novels

Short story collections

Other works

Legacy

O'Connor's Complete Stories won the 1972 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction[1] and was named the "Best of the National Book Awards" by Internet visitors in 2009.[lower-alpha 1]

The Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, named in honor of O'Connor by the University of Georgia Press, is a prize given annually since 1983 to an outstanding collection of short stories.

O'Connor was the first fiction writer born in the twentieth century to have her works collected and published by the Library of America, which occurred in 1988.

O'Connor's best friend, Betty Hester, received a weekly letter from her for more than a decade. These provided the bulk of the correspondence collected in The Habit of Being, a selection of the ones edited by Sally Fitzgerald. The reclusive Hester was given the pseudonym "A.," and her identity was not known until after she killed herself in 1998. Much of O'Connor's best-known writing on religion, writing, and the South is contained in these and other letters, including letters written to her friends Brainard Cheney and Samuel Ashley Brown. The complete collection of the unedited letters between O'Connor and Hester was unveiled by Emory University on May 12, 2007; the letters were given to the university in 1987 with the stipulation that they not be released to the public for 20 years.[17]

The Flannery O'Connor Book Trail is a series of Little Free Libraries stretching between O'Connor's homes in Savannah and Milledgeville.

The Flannery O'Connor Childhood Home is a historic house museum in Savannah, Georgia where Flannery O'Connor lived during her childhood. The house is located at 207 E. Charlton Street on Lafayette Square. Today, in addition to serving as a museum, the house hosts several events and programs throughout the year. Their most well-known program is the annual Ursrey Memorial Lecture. The Ursrey Memorial Lecture, founded in 2009 by Mrs. Alene Ursrey, Dr. John Hunt, and Ms. Betsy Cain, includes a reading and lecture and often educational workshops and gatherings. It is free and open to the public, and is endowed "in memory of the brothers Terry and Ashley Ursrey, native Georgians who, like Flannery O'Connor, were lifelong devotees of all things Southern, particularly the art of storytelling."[18]

In June 2015, the United States Postal Service honored O'Connor with a new postage stamp, the 30th issuance in the Literary Arts series.[19] Some criticized the stamp as failing to reflect O'Connor's character and legacy.[20][21]

Notes

  1. 1 2 As part of the Fiction Award's 60th anniversary celebration, writers associated with the National Book Foundation composed a ballot of the best six of 77 winning books—77 because a few awards were split and there were multiple fiction categories for several years in the 1980s.
    "A Celebration of the 60th National Book Awards" (2009 online poll). National Book Foundation: Awards: Best of the NBAs Fiction. Retrieved 2012-03-30.
  2. ↑ Various sources incorrectly cite Ridgefield, Connecticut, as his home from the 1940s into the 1960s. He, in fact, lived on Seventy Acres Road in the adjacent town of Redding. He and 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.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "National Book Awards – 1972". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-30. (With essays by Alice Elliott Dark and others (five) from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.)
  2. ↑ Gooch, Brad. "New York Times Topics: Flannery O'Connor". The New York Times. Retrieved November 14, 2012.
  3. ↑ Bailey, Blake. "Between the House and the Chicken Yard". Virginia Quarterly Review (Spring 2009): 202–205.
  4. ↑ "Do You Reverse?". British Pathé. Retrieved 23 September 2015.
  5. ↑ O'Connor, Flannery; Rosemary M. Magee (1987). Conversations with Flannery O'Connor. p. 38. ISBN 0-87805-265-8.
  6. ↑ "Andalusia Farm – Home of Flannery O'Connor". andalusiafarm.org. Retrieved 2016-03-04.
  7. ↑ The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, by Paul Elie, Copyright 2003, Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
  8. ↑ Gooch,Brad. Flannery:A Life of Flannery O'Connor. NY: Little, Brown, 2009, p. 76
  9. ↑ Flannery O'Connor, Cartoonist, Hogan's Alley #2, 1995
  10. ↑ Gooch, Brad. Flannery:A Life of Flannery O'Connor. NY:Little, Brown, 2009, p. 146-152
  11. ↑ O'Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Eds. Robert and Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, 1969: p. 40
  12. 1 2 O'Connor, Flannery (1979). The Habit of Being - Letters of Flannery O'Connor (1st ed.). New York, NY, USA: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. p. 90. ISBN 9780374167691. Retrieved 27 July 2015.
  13. ↑ Farmer, David (1981). Flannery O'Connor: A Descriptive Bibliography. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc.
  14. ↑ Gordon, Sarah (10 July 2002). "New Georgia Encyclopedia - Flannery O'Connor". New Georgia Encyclopedia. Georgia Humanities Council. Retrieved 27 July 2015.
  15. ↑ Martin, Carter W. The True Country: Themes in the Fiction of Flannery O'Connor. Vanderbilt University Press. 1968.
  16. ↑ O'Connor, Flannery; Leo Zuber; Carter W. Martin (1983). The Presence of Grace, and Other Book Reviews. p. 4. ISBN 978-0-8203-0663-6.
  17. ↑ All Things Considered, May 12, 2007.
  18. ↑ "About Ursrey". Flanneryoconnorhome.org. Retrieved 2015-07-06.
  19. ↑ US Postal Service Publication (2015/Volume 20/Quarter 3) page 7, item E:
  20. ↑ Downes, Lawrence (June 4, 2015). "A Good Stamp Is Hard to Find". Opinion. The New York Times. Archived from the original on February 24, 2016.
  21. ↑ "A Stamp of Good Fortune". Work in Progress. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. July 2015. Archived from the original on April 8, 2016. [T]he soft focus portrait and oversized, decorative peacock feathers . . . do little to support the composition or speak to O’Connor as a literary force. And why do away with her signature cat-eye sunglasses? A 'soft focus' Flannery is at odds with her belief that, 'modern writers must often tell "perverse" stories to "shock" a morally blind world . . . It requires considerable courage not to turn away from the story-teller.'

Further reading

External links

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