25- ] American Literature - Flannery O'Connor

 25- ] American Literature 

Flannery O’Connor 1925 – 1964

Flannery O’Connor wrote two novels and thirty-two short stories, and also several reviews and commentaries. Her reputation is based mainly on her short stories. She was a Southern writer and relied heavily on regional settings and typically southern characters. She was strongly Roman Catholic, which informed her exploration of ethics and morality.

Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925. When she died at the age of thirty-nine, America lost one of its most gifted writers at the height of her powers. O’Connor wrote two novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960), and two story collections, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1964). Her Complete Stories, published posthumously in 1972, won the National Book Award that year, and in a 2009 online poll it was voted as the best book to have won the award in the contest’s 60-year history. Her essays were published in Mystery and Manners (1969) and her letters in The Habit of Being (1979). In 1988 the Library of America published her Collected Works; she was the first postwar writer to be so honored. O’Connor was educated at the Georgia State College for Women, studied writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and wrote much of Wise Blood at the Yaddo artists’ colony in upstate New York. She lived most of her adult life on her family’s ancestral farm, Andalusia, outside Milledgeville, Georgia (less)

The writer Flannery O’Connor was known for her dark, funny and sassy stories about misfits, outsiders and the types of offbeat characters she encountered while living in the American South. O’Connor herself could be considered a sort of outsider. Plagued by symptoms of lupus in the latter part of her life and mostly bound to the farm where she lived with her mother and many peacocks, she often wrote about themes of isolation and created characters driven by desires to connect with each other, society at large, or with God. Her stories, which have inspired many writers and readers over the years, were also imbued with a kind of dark humor and exploration of faith and mortality that was often attributed to her illness.

“Flannery O’Connor’s life in some ways could have come out of a Flannery O’Connor story,” said contemporary writer Alice McDermott, who was influenced by O’Connor’s work. “It was the illness I think that made her the writer that she is.”

Born Mary Flannery O’Connor in Savannah, Georgia, to an Irish Catholic immigrant family, the young writer was largely encouraged to write and draw by her father, who died of lupus when she was 15 years old. There remains no cure for the disease – only treatment of its symptoms. It was a turning point for O’Connor.

Devastated by her father’s death, but also motivated to pursue her literary ambitions, O’Connor began studying writing during World War II in Georgia before attending the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and then being admitted to the famed Yaddo writing program in Saratoga Springs, NY. O’Connor dropped her first name, Mary, around this time. After her time at Yaddo, O’Connor remained on the East Coast for a while longer to write her first novel, “Wise Blood” (published 1952).The family she was boarding with at the time, Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, remembered that one day, O’Connor told them: “I think I’d better see a doctor, because I can’t raise my arms to the typewriter.”

When O’Connor returned to Georgia to see a doctor, he diagnosed her with lupus, but only told the diagnosis to O’Connor’s mother, Regina.

“Her mother, knowing that the father had died of the same disease, thought that the shock would be too great for Flannery and decided not to tell her,” said Sally Fitzgerald. “[Flannery] lost her hair. She was rather disfigured by the medicine. It could be combated, although not cured, by cortisone. This is the way she was able to live as long as she did.”

In 1951 when O’Connor became intensely ill, she continued to think it was merely arthritis that was bothering her. She moved out to the family’s dairy farm with her mother. By then, O’Connor was using crutches to get around. Both women lived on the ground floor of the home so that O’Connor had no need to climb the stairs.

At the farm, O’Connor continued writing religiously. Every morning, seven days a week, never taking a single day off, even Sunday. Being confined to the farm, O’Connor also began finding her material and characters in her environs.

“After she got sick, she was a prisoner of her body. I think she loved writing so much because it freed her from the corporeal,” said the writer and theater critic Hilton Als.

 

“She realized that she didn’t have to sit in New York and lose her ear for Southern speech, that she had it everywhere. The farm women, the farm people,” said Fitzgerald.

One day, as Fitzgerald was driving O’Connor around to do errands, Fitzgerald revealed her lupus diagnosis.

“She said something again about her arthritis. I said, ‘Flannery, you don’t have arthritis. You have lupus.'” Fitzgerald recalled. “Her hand was shaking. My knee was shaking on the clutch.

“We drove back up and down the road, and a few minutes later she said, ‘Well, that’s not good news. But I can’t thank you enough for telling me. I thought I had lupus. And I thought I was going crazy. And I’d a lot rather be sick than crazy’.”

O’Connor launched herself into writing with even more fervor. Her friends and acquaintances who knew her around this time noted that she rarely complained about her illness and was usually in good humor.

“One of the few signs of Flannery’s lupus was the fact that after the midday meal, you could see her tiring,” said friend Louise Abbot. “The cortisone derivative that she took, which saved her life, had softened the bones and also had put her on crutches and this had altered her appearance. But she was wonderfully animated when she was interested in what she was saying, when a good question was asked and she could answer with zest.”

“I’m making out fine, in spite of any conflicting stories,” O’Connor wrote around this time. “I have enough energy to write with, and as that is all I have any business doing anyhow, I can with one eye squinting take it all as a blessing.”

While outwardly coping with her illness, O’Connor’s writing began reflecting the suffering, both physical and mental, she was undergoing at that time. The work that came next, “A Good Man Is Hard To Find,” a collection of short stories,  was a critical and literary success that changed O’Connor’s reputation and popularized her work.

“She looks at the darkness unflinchingly and she approaches it with clarity and with precision. And that I think is her greatness,” the writer Mary Gordon said of O’Connor’s work. “I think that it’s inevitable that her dark view of the body and not nature, but the bodily world as being only a source of dark things, has to be connected to her lupus. The deformed body, the broken body, the afflicted body is very much a theme that recurs in her work.”

Her work reflected flawed characters who interacted with disabled characters in what she herself referred to as “grotesque” scenarios and often violent narratives. But O’Connor also used that violence as a vehicle for internal transformations for her characters who were in pursuit of God’s grace — a way to explore religion and morality through the grotesque.

“Grace changes us and the change is painful,” she wrote in one of the letters she exchanged with a friend during this time.

“In some ways, I think we can say now thank God for her suffering, because it allowed her to produce the work that she produced,” said McDermott.

By 1965, as O’Connor was putting together her collection of stories, “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” her editor Robert Giroux said he knew he was “working with a dying writer.”

“She was in the hospital in Atlanta. It was, in a way, it was in kind of a horror story because she was so anxious to get the last story, ‘Revelation,'” Giroux said. “She wanted that to get in.”

O’Connor died on August 3, 1964 at the age of 39, some 12 years after her diagnosis. Her body of work includes two novels, at least 32 short stories and numerous essays. There have been multiple film adaptations of her work and she even won a posthumous National Book Award for Fiction in 1972 for the “Complete Stories” book that was compiled after her death,  providing an enduring legacy for this unique writer for generations to come.

Mary Flannery O'Connor (March 25, 1925 – August 3, 1964) was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist. She wrote two novels and 31 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries.

She was a Southern writer who often wrote in a sardonic Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters, often in violent situations. The unsentimental acceptance or rejection of the limitations or imperfections or differences of these characters (whether attributed to disability, race, crime, religion or sanity) typically underpins the drama.[2]

Her writing reflected her Roman Catholic faith and frequently examined questions of Catholicism-defined morality and ethics. Her posthumously compiled Complete Stories won the 1972 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and has been the subject of enduring praise.

Career

O'Connor is primarily known for her short stories. She published two books of short stories: A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (published posthumously in 1965). Many of O'Connor's short stories have been re-published in major anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories.[20]

O'Connor's two novels are Wise Blood (1952) (made into a film by John Huston) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960). She also has had several books of her other writings published, and her enduring influence is attested by a growing body of scholarly studies of her work.

 

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 writing career can be divided into four five-year periods of increasing skill and ambition, 1945 to 1964:

Postgraduate Student: Iowa Writers' Workshop, first published stories, drafts of Wise Blood. Literary influences include Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James

Early: Wise Blood completed and published. In this period, satirical elements dominate. Influences include Jacques Maritain.

Middle: A Good Man Is Hard to Find published, The Violent Bear It Away written and published. Influences include Friedrich von Hügel. In this period, the mystical undercurrents begin to have primacy.

Mature: Everything That Rises Must Converge written. Influences include Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Mary Anne Long. In this period, the notion of grotesque is expanded to include the good as grotesque, and the grotesque as good.

Characteristics

Regarding her emphasis of the grotesque, O'Connor said: "[A]nything 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." Her texts usually take place in the South and revolve around morally flawed characters, frequently interacting with people with disabilities or disabled themselves (as O'Connor was), while the issue of race often appears. Most of her works feature disturbing elements, though she did not like to be characterized as cynical. "I am mighty tired of reading reviews that call A Good Man brutal and sarcastic," she wrote. "The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism... When I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror."

She felt deeply informed by the sacramental and by the Thomist notion that the created world is charged with God. Yet she did 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 her 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 open to the touch of divine grace. This ruled out a sentimental understanding of the stories' violence, as of her own illness. She wrote: "Grace changes us and the 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 used such characters' inability to come to terms with disability, race, poverty, and fundamentalism, other than in sentimental illusions, to illustrate her view that the secular world was failing in the twentieth century.

In several stories, O'Connor explored some of the most sensitive contemporary issues that her liberal and fundamentalist characters might encounter. She addressed the Holocaust in her story "The Displaced Person", racial integration in "Everything That Rises Must Converge" and intersexuality in "A Temple of the Holy Ghost". Her fiction often included references to the problem of race in the South; occasionally, racial issues come to the forefront, as in "The Artificial Nigger", "Everything that Rises Must Converge", and "Judgement Day", her last short story and a drastically rewritten version of her first published story, "The Geranium".

Despite her secluded life, her writing reveals an uncanny grasp of the nuances of human behavior. O'Connor gave many lectures on faith and literature, traveling quite far despite her frail health. Politically, she maintained a broadly progressive outlook in connection with her faith, voting for John F. Kennedy in 1960 and supporting the work of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement.[

Legacy, awards, and tributes

O'Connor's Complete Stories won the 1972 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and, in a 2009 online poll, was named the best book ever to have won the National Book Awards

In June 2015, the United States Postal Service honored O'Connor with a new postage stamp, the 30th issuance in the Literary Arts series. Some criticized the stamp as failing to reflect O'Connor's character and legacy.

She was inducted into the Savannah Women of Vision investiture in 2016.

The Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, named in honor of O'Connor by the University of Georgia Press, is a prize given annually since 1983 to an outstanding collection of short stories.

In 1998, New Jersey rock artist Bruce Springsteen published the song A Good Man Is Hard to Find (Pittsburgh), based on the aforementioned short story. This was a recording from 1982.

Killdozer published the song Lupus, based on the disease that took O'Connor life. This song can be found on the 1989 album 12 Point Buck.

The Flannery O'Connor Book Trail is a series of Little Free Libraries stretching between O'Connor's homes in Savannah and Milledgeville.

The Flannery O'Connor Childhood Home is a historic house museum in Savannah, Georgia, where O'Connor lived during her childhood. In addition to serving as a museum, the house hosts regular events and programs.

Loyola University Maryland had a student dormitory named for O'Connor. In 2020, Flannery O'Connor Hall was renamed in honor of activist Sister Thea Bowman. The announcement also mentions, "This renaming comes after recent recognition of Flannery O’Connor, a 20th century Catholic American writer, and the racism present in some of her work."

The film, Flannery: The Storied Life of the Writer from Georgia has been described as the story of a writer "who wrestled with the greater mysteries of existence"

Works

Main article: Flannery O'Connor bibliography

Novels

Wise Blood (1952)

The Violent Bear It Away (1960)

Short story collections

A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (1955)

Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965)

The Complete Stories (1971)

Other works

Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (1969)

The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor (1979)

The Presence of Grace: and Other Book Reviews (1983)

Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works (1988)

Flannery O'Connor: The Cartoons (2012)

A Prayer Journal (2013)

Flannery O'Connor Books

Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925, and died in 1964, at the age of 39. Despite her short life, she transformed American fiction with her two novels and 32 short stories, which relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters to probe moral and religious issues. She is best known for her story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," which appeared in a book of the same name. Posthumously compiled, the Complete Stories won the 1972 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.

Who Was Flannery O'Connor?

Flannery O'Connor studied writing at the University of Iowa and published “The Geranium,” her first short story, in 1946. She wrote novels but was best known for her short story collections. She died of lupus in 1964 after fighting it for more than 10 years.

Early Life and Education

Born on March 25, 1925, in Savannah, Georgia, O'Connor is considered one of the greatest short story writers of the 20th century. She faced some hardships growing up, losing her father as a teenager; he died of systemic lupus erythematosus.

Early on, O'Connor demonstrated her literary talents for school publications. Studying at what is now the University of Iowa for a master's degree, O'Connor's first story, "The Geranium," was published in 1946. She had also begun what was to be first novel, Wise Blood, published in 1952.

Commercial Success

After graduating in 1947, O'Connor pursued her writing, spending time at several months at Yaddo, a Saratoga Springs, New York artists' retreat. Her work was informed by her experiences growing up as a Catholic in the South. Religion was a recurring theme in her work, and the main characters of her first and second novels were preachers of sorts.

O'Connor was best-known, however, for her short stories, which appeared in several collections, including A Good Man Is Hard To Find and Other Stories (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965).

Death and Legacy

After battling lupus, an autoimmune disease, for more than a decade, O'Connor died on August 3, 1964, in Milledgeville, Georgia. For her work, she received many honors, including an O. Henry Award in 1957 and the National Book Award in 1972.

American novelist and short-story writer whose works, usually set in the rural American South and often treating of alienation, concern the relationship between the individual and God.

O’Connor grew up in a prominent Roman Catholic family in her native Georgia. She lived in Savannah until her adolescence, but the worsening of her father’s lupus erythematosus forced the family to relocate in 1938 to the home in rural Milledgeville where her mother had been raised. After graduating from Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College & State University) in 1945, she studied creative writing at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Her first published work, a short story, appeared in the magazine Accent in 1946. Her first novel, Wise Blood (1952; film 1979), explores, in O’Connor’s own words, the “religious consciousness without a religion.” Wise Blood consists of a series of near-independent chapters—many of which originated in previously published short stories—that tell the tale of Hazel Motes, a preacher’s grandson who returns from military service to his hometown after losing his faith and then relocates to another town, this one populated by a grotesque cast of itinerant loners, false prophets, and displaced persons on the make. His lonely tragicomic search for redemption, which includes his founding of the Church Without Christ, becomes increasingly violent and phantasmagorical. Wise Blood combines the keen ear for common speech, the caustic religious imagination, and the flair for the absurd that were to characterize O’Connor’s subsequent work. With the publication of further short stories, first collected in A Good Man Is Hard to Find, and Other Stories (1955), she came to be regarded as a master of the form. The collection’s eponymous story became possibly her best-known work. In it O’Connor created an unexpected agent of salvation in the character of an escaped convict called The Misfit, who kills a quarreling family on vacation in the Deep South.

Her other works of fiction are a novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960), and the short-story collection Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965). A collection of occasional prose pieces, Mystery and Manners, appeared in 1969. The Complete Stories, published posthumously in 1971, contains several stories that had not previously appeared in book form; it won a National Book Award in 1972.

Disabled for more than a decade by the lupus erythematosus she inherited from her father, which eventually proved fatal, O’Connor lived modestly, writing and raising peafowl on her mother’s farm at Milledgeville. The posthumous publication of The Habit of Being (1979), a book of her letters; The Presence of Grace, and Other Book Reviews (1983), a collection of her book reviews and correspondence with local diocesan newspapers; and A Prayer Journal (2013), a book of private religious missives, provided valuable insight into the life and mind of a writer whose works defy conventional categorization. O’Connor’s corpus is notable for the seeming incongruity of a devout Catholic whose darkly comic works commonly feature startling acts of violence and unsympathetic, often depraved, characters. She explained the prevalence of brutality in her stories by noting that violence “is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace.” It is this divine stripping of human comforts and hubris, along with the attendant degradation of the corporeal, that stands as the most salient feature of O’Connor’s work.