Flannery O'Connor
Times Topics
By Brad GoochWhen Flannery OConnor was 5 years old, she purportedly taught her pet bantam chicken to walk backward. The stunt attracted the attention of the Pathe newsreel company, and a Yankee cameraman was dispatched to her familys backyard in Savannah, Ga., to document the trick. OConnor never saw the humorous short, though it was screened in many movie theaters across America in 1932. Yet years later in an essay in Holiday magazine, she claimed the unlikely event marked me for life.By the time she was wrote that 1961 essay, The King of the Birds, OConnor was a cult literary celebrity. She had published two novels  Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960)--as well as the collection of stories A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955)  that truly put her on the map. The OConnor familys antebellum home in Milledgeville, Ga., was featured in Newsweek; a quasi- glamorous portrait appeared in Harpers Bazaar; her work was excerpted in Vogue. She used her freakish chicken as a pretext to meditate on her uneasy relation to fame and popular culture, claiming that all the attention made her feel like a cross between Roy Rogerss horse and Miss Watermelon of 1955.Dying in 1964 of lupus at age 39, unmarried, having lived mostly on a dairy farm with her mother, OConnors life and work might then have been expected to fade from memory. She swore there would be no biographies as lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy. Yet The New York Times deemed a story in her collection, Everything That Rises Must Converge, published eight months after her death, among the few masterpieces of the form in English; her Complete Stories won a posthumous 1972 National Book Award; she was the first postwar American woman author in the canonic Library of America; the phrase like something out of Flannery OConnor entered our language as shorthand for nailing many a funny, dark, askew moment. Like her backward chicken, OConnors fiction continues to fascinate by running counter to much trendy literary culture.SavannahBorn in Savannah on March 25, 1925, Mary Flannery OConnor was the only child of Edward, a real estate agent, and Regina. Living on Lafayette Square, in the shadow of St. John the Baptist Cathedral, she was raised in a minority Irish-Catholic community within the larger Protestant South, and was taught by the strict Sisters of Mercy at St. Vincents Grammar School. Writing and drawing ambidextrously from an early age, her first book, lovingly bound by her father, was My Relitives, a series of scathing satiric drawings and captions. Her highly protected girlhood was shattered when her father developed lupus and died in early 1941, after briefly moving his family to Atlanta for a Depression-era FHA job.MilledgevilleOConnors mother then took her to live with relatives in the Cline family home, an 1838 columned Federal clapboard house, briefly used as the governors mansion when Milledgeville served as the antebellum capital of Georgia. She passed her teen years in a strongly matriarchal world with Regina as well as her three aunts  Mary, Katie, and Gertie. OConnor developed a high profile as class cartoonist at both PeabodyHigh School and the local Georgia State College for Women, as she produced painstaking linoleum-cut cartoons that were single-frame satires on campus life. Admiring James Thurber, she submitted cartoons to The New Yorker magazine, receiving back a lot of encouragin rejection slips.Up NorthAt first planning on a career as a political cartoonist, in the fall of 1945 OConnor enrolled in the journalism graduate school at the State University of Iowa. Within her first few weeks in Iowa City, she found her way to Paul Engles Writers Workshop, the first MFA program in the country, and switched her major. Discovering her vocation as a writer, she dropped Mary from her name; had her first story, The Geranium, published in Accent magazine; received a Rinehart fellowship to work on a novel. In 1948, she moved on to spend nine months at the artists colony Yaddo, where she met the poet Robert Lowell; lived for six months, in 1949, in Manhattan, meeting her publisher Robert Giroux; boarded in Redding, Conn., with poet-translator Robert Fitzgerald, his wife Sally and their children, writing Wise Blood.AndalusiaOConnor developed a high fever on a train ride home to Georgia at Christmastime 1950. She was diagnosed, like her father, with lupus erythematosus, and over the next year was in and out of hospitals in Milledgeville and at Emory University in Atlanta. She recuperated at Andalusia, a 550-acre dairy farm outside Milledgeville run by her mother with hired labor. She took a room on the first floor of its former plantation house, as she was too weak to climb stairs. Each morning she worked on the galleys of Wise Blood, which was published by Harcourt, Brace, in May 1952, to mixed reviews. According to her editor Robert Giroux, I was disappointed by the reviews more than she was; they all recognized her power but missed her point. After another flare-up of lupus, following a visit in the summer of 1952 to Connecticut, she settled in earnest on the farm, ordering the first of her many beloved peacocks.Freaks and FolksBy 1953 OConnor was following a monastically regular pattern of life: rising with the roosters; going to Mass at Sacred Heart Church most mornings; writing for three hours, seven days a week; lunching at Sanford House in town; undertaking a vast correspondence in the afternoons, as well as receiving guests both local and literary; reading, preferably Thomas Aquinas, at bedtime. I read a lot of theology, OConnor said, because it makes my writing bolder. She took up painting farm scenes, and began drawing more on the local types she referred to as freaks and folks to write her stories in the Southern grotesque style. These classic OConnor edgy tales were published, to much acclaim, in A Good Man Is Hard to Find (Harcourt, Brace; 1955). In The New York Times Book Review, novelist Caroline Gordon claimed that the collection exhibits what Henry James  called the artful brevity of a master. The book was a finalist for a 1956 National Book Award but lost to John OHaras Ten North Frederick.Everything That RisesOConnor made her only trip outside the country to Lourdes, with her mother, in April of 1958. I prayed there for the novel I was working on, not for my bones, which I care less about, she later wrote of her visit to the healing spring. The novel for which she prayed was eventually published as The Violent Bear It Away (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy; 1960). The next year she published an introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann, (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy; 1961), about a child with a disfiguring facial tumor cared for by the Sisters of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Cancer Home in Atlanta. In 1962, OConnor began working on an unfinished third novel, tentatively titled Why Do the Heathen Rage?, though she mostly concentrated on writing stories; she also delivered over 60 talks and readings, often on crutches, at colleges and universities around the country, including the University of Chicago, Notre-Dame, Vanderbilt, Loyola and Georgetown. She confided to a friend that she possessed an element of ham.In 1964, OConnors lupus flared following surgery for a fibroid tumor. She was treated at BaldwinCountyHospital in Milledgeville and Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta. The reactivation of the disease coincided with her attempt to gather stories for a planned second story collection. She continued to work on Judgment Day, a reworking of her first published story The Geranium, and Parkers Back, hiding the pages under her hospital pillow so that the doctors might not forbid her to work. She returned home in June, receiving extreme unction on July 7, and learned soon afterward that her story Revelation had won first prize in the OHenry Awards. On Aug. 3, OConnor died of kidney failure. Following a low Requiem Mass at SacredHeartChurch, on Aug. 4, she was buried next to her father in Memory Hill cemetery in Milledgeville. Her second collection of stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge, was published posthumously the next year, to powerful and unanimous praise. Charles Poore in the Times judged her promise  fulfilled; the work of a master, said the Newsweek critic. The back of the white book cover carried a sole epitaph by Thomas Merton: When I read Flannery OConnor, I do not think of Hemingway, or Katherine Anne Porter or Sartre, but rather of someone like Sophocles.
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Critic’s Notebook

What Ethan Hawke’s ‘Wildcat’ Gets Right About Flannery O’Connor

Those familiar with her menagerie of grotesques, her views of Southern society, her tortured faith and inner contradictions will get what his film is doing.

By Alissa Wilkinson

‘Wildcat’ Review: Seeing Flannery O’Connor Through Her Stories

Ethan Hawke teams up with his daughter, Maya Hawke, for an unconventional and somewhat muddled portrait of a singular author.

By Brandon Yu

National Endowment for the Humanities Announces $28.1 Million in Grants

The first round of funding for the year will support 204 projects across the country.

By Sarah Bahr

John McWhorter

Let’s Have Fewer Cancellations. Let People Take Their Lumps, Then Move On.

The default should be forbearance for those who’ve breached woke etiquette.

By John McWhorter

from the book review archives

Review: ‘The Complete Stories,’ by Flannery O’Connor

This collection — which appeared seven years after the Southern Gothic writer’s death in 1964 — was reviewed by Alfred Kazin.

Writer’s Best Friend

On National Pet Day, we look at some of our most famous authors and the furry companions — dogs, cats and even goats — who offered them inspiration.

By Alexandra Alter and Erica Ackerberg

‘Flannery’ Review: Stories About a Writer

Flannery O’Connor created a still-disturbing body of work; but this documentary is surprisingly flat.

By Glenn Kenny

Finding Comfort in the Classics

Editors and writers on the Books desk — along with colleagues from the newsroom — recommend some time-tested books that offer escape from the present moment.

By Elisabeth Egan and Tina Jordan

Flannery O’Connor Documentary Wins New Award From Library of Congress

The filmmakers Elizabeth Coffman and Mark Bosco will be awarded the first Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film, which comes with a $200,000 finishing grant.

By Lauren Messman