Flannery O%60Connor Biography and List of Works

American writer particularly acclaimed for her stories, which combined the comic with the tragic. Along with writers like Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty, O'Connor belongs to the Southern Gothic tradition that focused on the decaying south. O'Connor's body of work is small, consisting of only thirty-one stories, two novels and some speeches and letters.

"Does one's integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do? I think that usually it does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man, Freedom cannot be conceived simply."
(from Wise Blood, 1952)

Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, the only child of a Catholic family. The region was part of the 'Christ-haunted' Bible belt of the Southern States, and this shaped her writing as described in her essay "The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South" (1969). O'Connor's father, Edward F. O'Connor, was a realtor owner, and for many years the mayor of Milledgeville. He later worked for a construction company and died in 1941. Her mother, Regina L. (Cline) O'Connor, came from a prominent family in the state.

When O'Connor was 12, her family moved to Milledgeville, her mother's birthplace. She attended the Peabody High School and enrolled in the Georgia State College for Women. She edited the college magazine and graduated in 1945 with an A.B. O'Connor then continued her studies at the University of Iowa, where she attended writer's workshops and published her first short story "The Geranium", at the age of 21 . In the following year she received a Master of Fine Arts in Literature degree. After another year at the university she moved to an apartment hotel in New York, and published four chapters of Wise Blood in Mademoiselle, Sewanee Review, and Partisan Review in 1948 and 1949. The complete novel appeared in 1952. It dealt with a young religious enthusiast, who attempts to establish a church without Christ. O'Connor's second novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960), had a similar subject matter.

The young protagonist of Wise Blood, Hazel Mote, returns from the army with his faith gone awry. He founds the Church Without Christ, wears a preacher's bright blue suit and a preacher's fierce black hat. He is accompanied by bizarre villains such as Asa Hawks, who pretends to have blinded himself, and Sabbath Lily, his daughter who turns into a monster of sexual voracity, and the fox-faced young Enoch Emery, who steals a mummy from a museum , which he thinks of as "the new Jesus." Enoch knows things because "He had wise blood like his daddy." Eventually Enoch finds his religious fulfilment dressed in a stolen gorilla costume. Hazel buys an old Essex automobile, his own religious mystery: "Nobody with a good car needs to be justified." Haze murders the False Prophet, his rival, by running over him with the Essex, and faces his cul-de-sac.

In 1950 O'Connor suffered her first attack of disseminated lupus, a debilitating blood disease that had killed her father. She returned to Milledgeville where she lived with her mother. In spite of the illness, O'Connor continued to write and occasionally lectured about creative writing in colleges. She read such contemporary thinkers as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-195) and Hannah Arendt (1906-1975). Among her friends were Robert Lowell, Caroline Gordon, Katherine Ann Porter and John Hawkes.

From 1955 O'Connor was forced to use crutches. An abdominal operation reactivated the lupus and O'Connor died on August 3, 1964, at the age of 39. Her second collection of short stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge, was published posthumously in 1965. The Complete Short Stories (1971) contained imaginative prose and several stories that had not previously appeared in book form. O'Connor's letters, published as The Habit of Being (1979), reveal her conscious craftsmanship in writing and the role of Roman Catholicism in her life.

O'Connor's short stories have been considered her finest work. With A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) she came to be regarded as a master of the form. In the story "Good Country People" a young woman with a sense of moral superiority experiences her downfall. The protagonist, Joy Hopewell, has an artificial leg as a result of a hunting accident. She has changed her name legally from Joy to Hulga. Joy-Hulga tries to seduce a Bible salesman, a seemingly simple country boy. He turns out to be another Hazel Motes and disappears with her artificial leg. "The Artificial Nigger" is a lesson about injustice. In the melodrama an escaped criminal called the Misfit casually wipes out a family. O'Connor's short stories however do not contain the same so strong theological reference as her novels. They often focus on grotesque characters, have a crisp humour, and are open to interpretation. Recurrent images include flaming suns, mutilated eyes, peacocks (which she raised in Milledgeville), and the colourful shirts, bright blue suits and stern black hats of preachers.

For further reading: The Added Dimensions, ed. by M.J. Friedman and L.A. Lawson (1966); The Eternal Crossroads: The Art of Flannery O'Connor by L.V. Driskell and J.T. Brittain (1971); Flannery O'Connor by K. Feeley (1972); Nightmares and Visions by G.H. Muller (1972); Invisible Parade: The Fiction of Flannery O'Connor by M. Orvell (1972); The Pruning Word by J.R. May (1976); Flannery O'Connor by D.T. McFarland (1976); Flannery O'Connor's Dark Comedies by C. Shloss (1980); Conversations With Flannery O'Connor by Rosemary M. Magee (1987); American Gargoyles: Flannery O'Connor and the Medieval Grotesque by Anthony Di Renzo (1993); The True Country: Themes in the Fiction of Flannery O'Connor by Carter W. Martin (1994); Flannery O'Connor: New Perspectives, ed. by Sura Prasad Rath and Mary Neff Shaw (1996); Writing Against God: Language As Message in the Literature of Flannery O'Connor by Joanne Halleran McMullen (1996); Flannery O'Connor; The Woman, the Thinker, the Visionary by ´Ted R. Spivey (1997); Flannery O'Connor's Characters by Laurence Enjolras (1998); Flannery O'Connor: Comprehensive Research and Study Guide, ed. by Harold Bloom (1999); Flannery O'Connor, Hermit Novelist by Richard Giannone (2000)

Wise Blood, (1952)