Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925, an only child in a devoutly Catholic family. She studied at Georgia State College for Women and then at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she earned her MFA in 1947. Her early fiction attracted immediate notice, and she had a year in New York, a brief stay at Yaddo artist colony, and the beginning of a promising literary life before lupus erythematosus — the same systemic autoimmune disease that had killed her father when she was fifteen — announced itself in 1950. She moved back to Georgia, to Andalusia, her mother's dairy farm outside Milledgeville, and lived there for the remaining fourteen years of her life. She died in 1964 at thirty-nine.

The biography matters because O'Connor never let it become an explanation or an excuse. She wrote from Andalusia, corresponded extensively with other writers and critics (those letters, collected in The Habit of Being (1979), are essential reading), raised peacocks on the farm, and produced two novels and thirty-two short stories of consistently high quality despite the crutches, the injections, the grinding management of chronic illness.

Her first novel, Wise Blood (1952), follows Hazel Motes, a young man returned from the war who tries to found a Church Without Christ, denying grace as violently as a preacher might affirm it. The Violent Bear It Away (1960), her second and final novel, is about a boy raised by his fanatical great-uncle to be a prophet, and what happens when that role collides with secular rationalism. Both novels are more interested in theological argument than in psychology, which is either their limitation or their distinctive power depending on how you read them.

The short stories are where her reputation is most secure. "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," "Good Country People," "Everything That Rises Must Converge," "The Displaced Person," "Parker's Back" — these are among the most technically accomplished short stories in American literature. They follow a recognizable structure: a character whose spiritual self-sufficiency is about to be destroyed by a violent intrusion of grace. The grandmother in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," Mrs. Turpin in "Revelation," Hulga in "Good Country People" — each is about to be shocked into a recognition they have been avoiding. The shock is usually physical and sometimes fatal.

O'Connor was a Catholic writing for an audience she assumed was not. She explained her methods in lectures collected in Mystery and Manners (1969): "to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures." Her grotesque characters — the con man with a hollow leg containing whiskey and a deck of cards, the peacock-owning grandmother meeting an escaped serial killer — are not realism's grotesque, not Dickens's exaggeration for social satire, but something closer to spiritual drama in which the ordinary world becomes briefly transparent.

The criticism of O'Connor that has intensified in recent decades concerns race. Her letters contain remarks about Black Americans that are, by any measure, racist — crude jokes, casual use of slurs, a failure to see the people her fiction sometimes uses as moral instruments for white characters' transformations. Her fiction's relationship to race is more complex than the letters suggest, but not complex enough to escape the charge. "The Displaced Person" and "Everything That Rises Must Converge" both engage with racial injustice; neither fully escapes the charge of centering white experience at the expense of Black humanity. These are real limitations in a body of work that is otherwise remarkably achieved.