Profile of Flannery O'Connor on Famous Like Me

Mary Flannery O'Connor (March 25, 1925 – August 3, 1964) was an American author. She was born in Savannah, Georgia.

Considered an important voice in American literature, O'Connor wrote two novels, 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 grotesques as characters. A "born" Roman Catholic, her writing is deeply informed by the sacramental, and the Thomist notion that the created world is charged with God.

Biography

Her father, Edward O'Connor, was diagnosed with lupus in 1937; he died on the first of February, 1941. Mary Flannery, the couple's only child, was devastated, and rarely spoke of him in later years. Flannery described herself as a "pigeon-toed only child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I'll-bite-you complex."

As a child she was in the local newspapers when a chicken that she owned could walk backwards. She said, "That was the most exciting thing that ever happened to me. It's all been downhill from there."

Ms. O'Connor attended Peabody High School, from which she graduated in 1942. She entered Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College & State University), where she majored in English and Sociology, the latter a perspective she satirized effectively in novels such as The Violent Bear It Away.

In 1946 Flannery O'Connor was accepted into the prestigious Iowa Writer's Workshop.

In 1949 O'Connor met and eventually accepted an invitation to stay with Robert Fitzgerald (translator of Greek epic plays and poems, including Oedipus Rex and both the Odyssey and the Iliad) and his wife, Sally, in rural Connecticut.

In 1951 she was diagnosed with lupus. She died August 3, 1964 at Baldwin County Hospital and was buried in Milledgeville, Georgia.

O'Connor lived on a large farm named Andalusia, where she raised and nurtured some 100 peacocks, and images of peacocks are often found on her books. She was obsessed with birds of all kinds and raised ducks, hens, geese, and any sort of exotic bird she could obtain.

Despite the fact that she had no known love affairs and lived a rather sheltered life, her writing reveals an almost uncanny grasp of the nuances of human behavior.

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.

Bibliography

• Wise Blood, 1952
• A Good Man Is Hard To Find, 1955
• The Violent Bear It Away, 1960
• A Memoir of Mary Ann (Editor and author of introduction), 1962
• Everything That Rises Must Converge, 1965
• Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, Edited by Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald, 1969
• The Habit of Being: Letters, Edited by Sally Fitzgerald, 1979
• The Presence of Grace and Other Book Reviews, Edited by Carter W. Martin, 1983

Compilations:

• Three by Flannery O'Connor (contains Wise Blood, A Good Man Is Hard To Find, and The Violent Bear It Away), 1964
• Three by Flannery O'Connor (contains Wise Blood, The Violent Bear It Away and Everything That Rises Must Converge), 1983
• The Complete Short Stories, 1971
• Collected Works (contains Wise Blood, A Good Man Is Hard To Find, The Violent Bear It Away, and Everything That Rises Must Converge), edited by Sally Fitzgerald, 1988

Unfinished Works:

• Fragments exist of an unfinished novel tenatively 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."

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