Flannery O'Connor

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Flannery O'Connor

Born March 25, 1925(1925-03-25)
Savannah, Georgia
Died August 3, 1964 (aged 39)
Baldwin County, Georgia
Occupation novelist, short story writer, essayist
Genres American Southern Gothic
Notable work(s) Wise Blood, The Violent Bear It Away, A Good Man Is Hard To Find
Influences

Mary Flannery O'Connor (March 25, 1925 – August 3, 1964) was an American novelist, short-story writer and essayist.

Contents

[edit] Biography

Flannery O'Connor was the only child of Edward F. O'Connor and Regina Cline O’Connor. Her father was diagnosed with lupus in 1937; he died on February 1, 1941 when Flannery was 15. The disease was hereditary in the O'Connor family. Flannery O'Connor was devastated, and almost never spoke of him in later years.[1]

O'Connor described herself as a "pigeon-toed child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I'll-bite-you complex." When O'Connor was five she taught a chicken to walk backwards, and it was this that led to her first experience of being a celebrity. The Pathé News people filmed "Little Mary O'Connor" with her trained chicken, and showed the film around the country. She said, "That was the most exciting thing that ever happened to me. It's all been downhill from there."

O'Connor attended the Peabody Laboratory School, from which she graduated in 1942. She entered Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College & State University), in an accelerated three-year program, and graduated June 1945 with a Social Sciences degree. In 1946 Flannery O'Connor was accepted into the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop.

In 1949 O'Connor met and eventually accepted an invitation to stay with Robert Fitzgerald (translator of Greek plays and epic poems, including Oedipus Rex and both the Odyssey and the Iliad, and also a respected poet in his own right) and his wife, Sally, in Redding, Connecticut.[2]

In 1951 she was diagnosed with disseminated lupus, and subsequently returned to her ancestral farm, Andalusia, in Milledgeville. She was only expected to live five more years; she lived nearly 15. At Andalusia, she raised and nurtured some 100 peafowl. Fascinated by birds of all kinds, she raised ducks, hens, geese, and any sort of exotic bird she could obtain, as well as incorporating images of peacocks often in her books. She describes her peacocks in an essay entitled "The King of Birds." Despite her sheltered life, her writing reveals an uncanny grasp of the nuances of human behavior.[original research?] She was a very devout Catholic, living in the "Bible-Belt," Protestant South. She collected books on Catholic theology and at times gave lectures on faith and literature, traveling quite far despite her frail health. Her bed-time reading was none other than the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas.[citation needed] She also had a wide correspondence, including such famous writers as Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. She never married, relying for companionship on her correspondence and on her close relationship with her mother.

O'Connor completed over two dozen short stories and two novels while lupus ravaged her body. She died on August 3, 1964, at the age of 39, of complications from lupus at Baldwin County Hospital and was buried in Milledgeville, Georgia, at Memory Hill Cemetery. Regina Cline O'Connor outlived her by many years, dying in 1997.

[edit] Career

An important voice in American literature, O'Connor wrote two novels and 32 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. She was a Southern writer in the vein of William Faulkner, often writing in a Southern Gothic style and relying heavily on regional settings and -- it is regularly said -- grotesque characters. However, she remarked "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" (Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose 40). Her texts often take place in the South and revolve around morally flawed characters, while the issue of race looms in the background. One of her trademarks is unsubtle foreshadowing, giving a reader an idea of what will happen far before it happens. Finally, she brands each work with a disturbing and ironic conclusion.

Her 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 and Other Stories (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (published posthumously in 1965).

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 O'Connor's 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. O'Connor 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." O'Connor's fiction became increasingly concerned with race as she neared the end of her life. The last story she published before dying was called "Judgment Day", which was a drastically rewritten version of her first published story, titled "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."

Her best friend, Betty Hester, received a weekly letter from O'Connor for over a decade. These letters provided the bulk of the correspondence collected in The Habit of Being, a selection of O'Connor's letters that was edited by Sally Fitzgerald. The reclusive Hester was given the pseudonym "A.," and her identity was not known until 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. The complete collection of the unedited letters between the two 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.[3] Betty was a lesbian, and Emory's Steve Enniss speculates that she probably kept the letters from public scrutiny for that reason.[4] The unsealed letters include unflattering remarks about O'Connor's friend William Sessions and the work of other Southern writers. [5]

The Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, named in honor of O'Connor, is a prize given annually to an outstanding collection of short stories.

[edit] Bibliography

Main article: Flannery O'Connor bibliography

[edit] Novels

[edit] Collections

[edit] References

  1. ^ The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, by Paul Elie, Copyright 2003, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
  2. ^ Various sources incorrectly cite Ridgefield, Connecticut as Fitzgerald's home from the 1940s into the 1960s. He, in fact, lived on Seventy Acres Road in the adjacent town of Redding, Connecticut. He and Flannery 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.
  3. ^ All Things Considered, May 12, 2007.
  4. ^ Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 10, 2007.
  5. ^ The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 13, 2007.

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

O'Connor-Oriented Websites

O'Connor Biography

Individual Articles on O'Connor

v • d • e
Works by Flannery O'Connor
Novels:
Short stories:
"A Good Man is Hard to Find" • "The Peeler" • "The River" • "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" • "A Stroke of Good Fortune" • "A Temple of the Holy Ghost" • "The Artificial Nigger" • "A Circle in the Fire" • "A Late Encounter with the Enemy" • "Good Country People" • "The Displaced Person" • "Everything That Rises Must Converge" • "Greenleaf" • "A View of the Woods" • "The Enduring Chill" • "The Comforts of Home" • "The Lame Shall Enter First" • "Revelation" • "Parker's Back" • "Judgement Day" • "The Geranium" • "The Barber" • "Wildcat" • "The Crop" • "The Turkey" • "The Train" • "An Afternoon in the Woods" • "The Partridge Festival"
Short story collections:
Nonfiction collections:
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose • The Habit of Being: Letters • The Presence of Grace and Other Book Reviews


Persondata
NAME O'Connor, Flannery
ALTERNATIVE NAMES O'Connor, Mary Flannery
SHORT DESCRIPTION American novelist, short story writer
DATE OF BIRTH March 25, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH Savannah, Georgia
DATE OF DEATH August 3, 1964
PLACE OF DEATH