O'CONNOR, Flannery

Born Mary Flannery O'Connor, 25 March 1925, Savannah, Georgia; died 3 August 1964, Milledgeville, Georgia

Daughter of Edward F. and Regina Cline O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925 and lived there with her parents until the age of thirteen. In 1938 the O'Connors moved to the small farming town of Milledgeville, Georgia. Her father died several years later of lupus erythematosus, an immune system disease that would lead to Flannery's own death in 1964. An only child, O'Connor attended Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College & State University) in Milledgeville after graduating from high school in 1942. While at Georgia State, she edited the campus literary magazine, the Corinthian, and provided illustrations for the school yearbook and newspaper.

O'Connor graduated from Georgia State in 1946, the same year her first short story, "The Geranium," was published in Accent. She received a fellowship to the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and graduated with a master's degree the following year. O'Connor then moved to upstate New York, where she was a resident at the Yaddo writers' colony in Saratoga Springs from 1948 to 1949. After leaving New York, she moved to Connecticut to live with friends and work on the novel that would become Wise Blood (1952). While in Connecticut, she was diagnosed with lupus and went home to Georgia to live with her mother.

Weak and exhausted, O'Connor could only write for three hours a day and "spend the rest of the day recuperating from it," she told a Saturday Review interviewer. The publication of Wise Blood brought O'Connor instant recognition as a powerful new literary talent, but she remained shy and modest about her success. The novel's protagonist is Haze Motes, a war veteran and shady faith healer who founds the Church Without Christ. Motes travels around the South preaching and seeking salvation but finds it only after blinding himself with quicklime.

Many of O'Connor's protagonists also search for salvation, only to find it after moments of great despair or destruction when their emotions have been stripped to the bone and only their essential selves remain. O'Connor herself explained the purpose of violence in her fiction: "The man in the violent situation reveals those qualities least dispensable in his personality, those qualities which are all he will have to take into eternity with him.… There is a moment in every great story in which the presence of grace can be felt as it waits to be accepted or rejected… ." Like Motes, many of O'Connor's characters are either literally or emotionally disabled, and their stories revolve around their struggle to find acceptance in others or in themselves.

In her second and final novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960), O'Connor tells the story of Tarwater, a 14-year-old orphan raised as a Christian prophet by his great-uncle, Old Tarwater. The boy must choose between this life and that offered to him by Rayber, his modern, rational uncle. Tarwater hopes to rid himself of any gifts for prophecy or healing by baptizing his cousin Bishop, but accidentally drowns him instead. In the end, Tarwater chooses his destiny as a prophet, but only after being molested by a stranger and succumbing to madness.

Although her physical condition improved enough to allow her to lecture at various colleges and universities, O'Connor was still unable to write as much as she would have liked. It was three years after Wise Blood that she published her first collection of short stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955). The title story is one of O'Connor's best known and follows a family en route to Florida for a vacation. The grandmother persuades her son to take a detour to search for a plantation she visited in her youth. Embarrassed that she has led the family to the wrong place, she inadvertently causes an accident that forces the family's car off the road. A murderous stranger whom O'Connor dubs the Misfit comes along and murders the stranded family one by one. Before being shot three times, the grandmother acknowledges that the deaths are her fault and the story closes with the Misfit's statement that "She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."

O'Connor later wrote to a fellow novelist that "grace, to the Catholic way of thinking, can and does use as its medium the imperfect, purely human, and even hypocritical." This story reveals not only the redemption possible in times of great distress but O'Connor's ear for Southern dialect and manners. Other well-known stories from this collection are "The Life You Save May Be Your Own," "The Displaced Person," and "The Artificial Nigger." The latter is about a country grandfather's decision to take his grandson to Atlanta so he will finally be content to stay on the farm. The boy, Nelson, considers this to be his second trip to town because he was born in a hospital in Atlanta. Angry at this, his grandfather points out that Nelson does not even know what a black person looks like and therefore knows nothing about the town. The two argue violently after the grandfather becomes lost and are reunited only when they sight a statue of a black man—an "artificial nigger."

O'Connor stubbornly refused to change the story's title despite her publisher's urging. She could not be accused of racism, however, for many of her stories, including most of those in the posthumously published collection Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965), show the cruelty and ignorance at the root of racial discrimination. O'Connor is credited with using her writings to give a new image to black Americans. In the title story of Everything That Rises, a racist white woman's confrontation with a black woman forces her to acknowledge the importance of black people in her life.

Several of O'Connor's most lauded works have been published posthumously. The Complete Stories (1972) received the National Book award and contains several stories from her university days that had never before been published. The Habit of Being (1979), a collection of her correspondence, shows her dedication to writing and reveals her own views on some of her best-known pieces. This work won several awards as did Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (1969), a collection of her lectures on both her own works and those of other authors. Several of O'Connor's writings have been adapted for the stage and screen, including "The Displaced Person," produced as a play in 1966, and Wise Blood, released as a feature film in 1980.

O'Connor is widely regarded as one of the most important American fiction writers of the 20th century. Her Southern Catholicism permeated her writings, which focus almost exclusively on "both the reality of human weakness and the redemptive power of God's grace" (Authors & Artists for Young People). Many of her works have strange, often deformed characters, and virtually all are set in the predominantly Protestant South of O'Connor's birth and upbringing. O'Connor continues to attract critical acclaim despite the fact that she wrote only two novels and about 30 short stories during her lifetime.