Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)

American writer, particularly acclaimed for her stories which combined comic with tragic and brutal. Along with authors like Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor belonged to the Southern Gothic tradition that focused on the decaying South and its damned people. O'Connor's body of work was 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. The spiritual heritage of the region shaped profoundly O'Connor's 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. He worked later for a construction company and died in 1941. Her mother, Regina L. (Cline) O'Connor, came from a prominent family in the state - her father had been a mayor of Milledgeville for many years.

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. At school 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 conducted by Paul Engle. At the age of 21 she published her first short story, 'The Geranium', in Accent. In the following year she received the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Literature. In 1947 she lived for seven months at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, N.Y., an estate left by the Trask family for writers, painters and musicians.

O'Connor published four chapters of Wise Blood in Mademoiselle, Sewanee Review, and Partisan Review in 1948 and 1949. The complete novel appeared 1952. It dealt with a young religious enthusiast, who attempts to establish a church without Christ. The Signet paperback version of the book advertised it as "A Searching Novel of Sin and Redemption". O'Connor's second novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960), had a related subject matter. The protagonist is Francis Marion Tarwater who begins his ministry in his youth. He baptizes and drowns Bishop, his uncle's idiot son. Old Tarwater warns his grand-nephew: "'You are the kind of boy,' the old man said, 'that the devil is always going to be offering to assists, to give you a smoke or a drink or a ride, and to ask you your bidnis. You had better mind how you take up with strangers.'" Young Tarwater sets fire to his own woods to clean himself, and like his great-uncle, a mad prophet, he finally becomes a prophet and a madman. O'Connor once explained that "I can write about Protestant believers better than Catholic believers - because they express their belief in diverse kinds of dramatic action which is obvious enough for me to catch. I can't write about anything subtle."

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 black hat. He is accompanied by bizarre villains. Asa Hawks pretends to have blinded himself. Sabbath Lily, his daughter, turns into a monster of sexual voracity. The fox-faced young Enoch Emery steals from a museum a mummy, which he thinks of as "the new jesus." Enoch knows things because "he had wise blood like his daddy." Eventually Enoch finds his religious fulfillment 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 his second-hand Essex, and faces his cul-de-sac.

John Huston read the novel in 1978 - he received a copy of it from Michael Fitzgerald, whose father was O'Connor's literary executor. Against all odds, Michael Fitzgerald got the money for the production, some $2,000,000; the screenplay was written by Michael and his brother, Benedict, and everyone worked for a minimum wage. Most of the film was shot in Macon, Georgia. "There were seven outstanding performances in Wise Blood. Only three of those seven actors have any reputation to speak of: Brad Dourif, Ned Beatty and Harry Dean Stanton. The other four are unknowns. They are all great stars, as far as I'm concerned. Nothing would make me happier than to see this picture gain popular acceptance and turn a profit. It would prove something. I'm not sure what... but something." ( John Huston in An Open Book, 1988) In 1950 O'Connor suffered her first attack from disseminated lupus, a debilitating blood disease that had killed her father. She returned to Milledgeville where she lived with her mother on her dairy farm. In spite of the illness, O'Connor continued to write and occasionally she lectured about creative writing in colleges. "I write every day for at least two hours," she said in an interview in 1952, "and I spend the rest of my time largely in the society of ducks."

"I am making out fine in spite of any conflicting stories," she wrote to Robert Lowell. "I have enough energy to write with and as that is all I have any business doing anyhow, I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing. What you have to measure out, you come to observe more closely, or so I tell myself." O'Connor read such thinkers as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin ( 1881-195 1881-195 ), George Santayana (1863-1952), and Hannah Arendt (1906-1975). In New York she had befriended with Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, two other literary Roman Catholics. She lived and wrote in their house in Ridgefield, Connecticut until illness redirected her life in 1951. O'Connor named Robert Fitzgerald as her literary executor. He selected and edited with his wife a volume of O'Connor's occasional prose, which was published in 1969 under the title Mystery and Manners.

From around 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 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.