(This tale of redemption, retribution, false prophets, bli...)
This tale of redemption, retribution, false prophets, blindness, blindings, and wisdom gives us one of the most riveting characters in American fiction.
(Steeped in a Southern Gothic tradition that would become ...)
Steeped in a Southern Gothic tradition that would become synonymous with her name, these stories show O'Connor's unique, grotesque view of life - infused with religious symbolism, haunted by apocalyptic possibility, sustained by the tragic comedy of human behavior, confronted by the necessity of salvation.
(In this novel, the orphaned Francis Marion Tarwater and h...)
In this novel, the orphaned Francis Marion Tarwater and his cousin, the schoolteacher Rayber, defy the prophecy of their dead uncle that Tarwater will become a prophet and baptize Rayber's young son, Bishop. A series of struggles ensues, as Tarwater fights an internal battle against his innate faith and the voices calling him to be a prophet while Rayber tries to draw Tarwater into a more "reasonable" modern world. Both wrestle with the legacy of their dead relative and lay claim to Bishop's soul.
(This collection is an exquisite legacy from a genius of t...)
This collection is an exquisite legacy from a genius of the American short story, in which she scrutinizes territory familiar to her readers: race, faith, and morality. The stories encompass the comic and the tragic, the beautiful and the grotesque; each carries her highly individual stamp and could have been written by no one else.
(The book opens with "The King of the Birds," her famous a...)
The book opens with "The King of the Birds," her famous account of raising peacocks at her home in Milledgeville, Georgia. There are three essays on regional writing, including "The Fiction Writer and His Country" and "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction"; two on teaching literature, including "Total Effect and the Eighth Grade"; and four on the writer and religion, including "The Catholic Novel in the Protestant South."
(The publication of this extraordinary volume firmly estab...)
The publication of this extraordinary volume firmly established Flannery O'Connor's monumental contribution to American fiction. There are thirty-one stories here in all, including twelve that do not appear in the only two story collections O'Connor put together in her short lifetime
(This Library of America collection, the most comprehensiv...)
This Library of America collection, the most comprehensive ever published, contains all of the author's novels and short-story collections, as well as nine other stories, eight of her most important essays, and a selection of 259 witty, spirited, and revealing letters, twenty-one published here for the first time.
(Including a facsimile of the entire journal in O'Connor's...)
Including a facsimile of the entire journal in O'Connor's own hand, A Prayer Journal is the record of a brilliant young woman's coming-of-age, a cry from the heart for love, grace, and art.
Mary Flannery O'Connor was an American writer of short stories and novels, which combined comedy, grotesquerie, and violence with a profound moral and theological vision. O'Connor wrote two novels and thirty-two short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries.
Background
Flannery O'Connor was born on March 25, 1925, in Savannah, Georgia, United States; the only child of Regine Cline and Edward Francis O'Connor, Jr. 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. O’Connor’s father died on February 1, 1941, and she and her mother continued to live in Milledgeville.
Education
O'Connor attended Peabody High School, where she worked as the school newspaper's art editor and from which she graduated in 1942. She then enrolled in Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College & State University) in Milledgeville graduating from it with a degree in social science in 1945. A fellowship enabled her to attend the Writers' Workshop at the State University of Iowa, from which she received a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1947. While at Iowa she published her first short story "The Geranium," and won a prize for a novel in progress for her Wise Blood.
Flannery O'Connor worked on her first novel, which she had begun writing while still a student of the State University of Iowa, at Yaddo, the writer's colony at Saratoga Springs, New York; and in Connecticut, where she lived in the household of the poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald.
In December 1950, on her way home to Milledgeville for Christmas, she became seriously ill on the train and was hospitalized on her arrival in Atlanta; she was diagnosed as having lupus, the same illness that had killed her father nine years earlier. After several months, during which time O'Connor was in and out of the hospital, she and her mother moved to "Andalusia," a dairy farm four miles from Milledgeville that Mrs. O'Connor had recently inherited and that she ran with the help of tenants.
During the first year after the outbreak of her illness O'Connor continued to work on the final revisions of her first novel, Wise Blood, which was published in 1952. Strong, original, drawn with hard outlines and in a peculiarly modern style, at once bizarrely comic and completely serious, it is the story of the ultimately futile attempts of Hazel Motes, the grandson of a Southern fundamentalist preacher, to escape from Jesus.
Following the publication of Wise Blood O'Connor returned to writing short fiction. The stories written between the summer of 1952 and 1955 (collected in A Good Man Is Hard To Find, 1955) make it obvious that she had come into her own as a short story writer. Wickedly funny, realistic, displaying her sharp eye for the comic and the grotesque and her accurate ear for Southern speech, often ending in unexpected and shocking violence, the best of them—"A Good Man Is Hard To Find," "The Life You Save May Be Your Own," "The Artificial Nigger," "The Displaced Person," "Good Country People" - are classics of the short story form.
Although a softening of the bone in her hip caused her to have to use crutches, O'Connor frequently accepted invitations to speak at colleges and writers' conferences in the latter half of the 1950s and early 1960s. She took advantage of these opportunities not only to give perceptive talks on the nature of fiction but to clarify her own position as a writer "with Christian concerns." Such a writer, she said, was interested both in the everyday reality seen all around (the level of manners) and in making that everyday reality transparent to the underlying level of mystery, the level of the eternal and the absolute. These talks, together with a number of essays on similar subjects, were edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald and published after O'Connor's death under the title Mystery and Manners (1969).
O'Connor's second collection of short stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge, continued in much the same vein as the first. It was completed just before her death and published posthumously in 1965. Her second novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960), has some thematic similarities with Wise Blood, although it is very different in style. As Wise Blood follows the protagonist's attempts to escape from his vocation to be a Christian, The Violent Bear It Away deals with the efforts of a backwoods Southern boy to escape his calling to be a prophet. In both cases, an act of violence plays a role at the turning points at which the characters embrace their painful vocations.
O'Connor had to have abdominal surgery in the spring of 1964. Her lupus reacted to the stress of the surgery and could not be controlled by drugs. In July she suffered kidney failure, and she died on August 3, 1964, in the Milledgeville Hospital.
Mary Flannery O'Connor was a devout Catholic despite living in the Protestant South. A prayer journal O'Connor had kept during her time at the University of Iowa was published in 2013. It included prayers and ruminations on faith, writing, and O'Connor's relationship with God.
Views
Mary called her work ‘stories about original sin’. Her writing can be described as being about the action of grace in the world, about those moments in which grace, usually in the form of violence, moves down on her comically content characters, sometimes opening their eyes to an atrocious comprehension and sometimes killing them. Many readers find O’Connor’s identification of the transcendent with an aggressive force repulsive and even more outrageous than the stories themselves. O’Connor on the other hand believed that a fierce shock was necessary to bring both her characters and her modern materialistic audience to knowledge of the potent reality of the realm of awe-inspiring mystery.
Quotations:
"All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal."
"Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not."
"Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay."
"The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live."
“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
“Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”
“I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.”
Personality
O’Connor lived modestly, writing and raising peafowl on her mother’s farm at Milledgeville. Fascinated by birds of all kinds, she raised ducks, ostrich, emus, toucans, and any sort of exotic bird she could obtain, while incorporating images of peacocks into her books. She described her peacocks in an essay entitled "The King of the Birds."
Physical Characteristics:
By the summer of 1952, O'Connor was diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus (lupus), as her father had been before her. O'Connor lived for twelve years after her diagnosis, seven years longer than expected.
Interests
raising peafowl
Connections
Flannery O'Connor never married and did not have children.
Father:
Edward Francis O'Connor, Jr.
Mother:
Regina Lucille O'Connor (Cline)
References
Flannery O'Connor: New Perspectives
These ten essays, seven of which are previously unpublished, reflect the broadening of critical approaches to Flannery O'Connor's work over the past decade. The essays offer both new directions for, and new insights into, reading O'Connor's fiction.
1996
Flannery O'Connor: The Obedient Imagination
Flannery O’Connor: The Obedient Imagination draws on Sarah Gordon’s thirty years of reading, teaching, and discussing one of our most complex and influential authors. It takes us closer than we have ever been to the creative struggles behind such literary masterpieces as Wise Blood and “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.”
2000
Flannery O'Connor's South
Analyzes how O'Connor portrayed the social, religious, and intellectual aspects of the South in her novels and short stories.
1980
The Terrible Speed of Mercy: A Spiritual Biography of Flannery O'Connor
In this biography, Jonathan Rogers gets at the heart of O’Connor’s work. He follows the roots of her fervent Catholicism and traces the outlines of a life marked by illness and suffering, but ultimately defined by an irrepressible joy and even hilarity. In her stories, and in her life story, Flannery O’Connor extends a hand in the dark, warning and reassuring us of the terrible speed of mercy.
Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South
Splendidly illuminating both O'Connor herself and the American mind, Wood's Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South will inform and fascinate a wide range of readers, from lovers of literature to those seriously engaged with religious history, cultural analysis, or the American South.
Creating Flannery O'Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers
Flannery O’Connor may now be acknowledged as the “Great American Catholic Author,” but this was not always the case. With Creating Flannery O’Connor, Daniel Moran explains how O’Connor attained that status, and how she felt about it, by examining the development of her literary reputation from the perspectives of critics, publishers, agents, adapters for other media, and contemporary readers.
2016
A Political Companion to Flannery O'Connor
A Political Companion to Flannery O'Connor explores the author's fiction, prose, and correspondence to reveal her central ideas about political thought in America.