Flannery O'Connor Dead at 39; Novelist and Short‐Story Writer; Used Religion and the South as Themes in Her Work—Won O. Henry Awards
The New York Times
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MILLEDGEVILLE, Ga., Aug. 3 (UPI)—Flannery O’Connor, one of the nation's most promising writers, died today. She was 39 years old.

Miss O’Connor had been ill for some years with a bone ailment that restricted her activity and forced her to use crutches.

She lived with her mother, Mrs. Regina O’Connor, on a 500-acre farm.

In Miss O’Connor's writing were qualities that attract and annoy many critics: she was steeped in Southern tradition, she had an individual view of her Christian faith and her fiction was often peopled by introspective children.

But while other writers received critical scorn for turning these themes into clichés, Miss O’Connor's two novels and few dozen stories were highly praised.

In reviewing her second novel, “The Violent Bear It Away,” for The New York Times in 1960, Orville Prescott described Miss O’Connor as a “literary white witch” whose “talent for fiction is so great as to be almost overwhelming.”

“She writes with blazing skill about the most appalling horrors,” he continued, “and sometimes makes them entirely real and perfectly natural.”

In contrast Miss O’Connor saw herself as “a novelist with Christian concerns” who wrote her stories “in relation to the redemption of Christ.” Many readers failed to see this relation, but they enjoyed her nevertheless.

Miss O’Connor was a Roman Catholic, but her main characters were Protestant Fundamentalists and fanatics. She suggested that the intensity of their faith was preferable to the tepid religion of a secularized churchman.

Miss O’Connor, who was born in Savannah, moved as a child to Milledgeville, a small town of mansions and farms. She lived in a two‐story house set on a profitable farm. She did not take part in the business of the farm, except for raising the peafowl that strutted around the grounds, and, frequently, in her stories.

She wrote every day of the week when possible, “I write from 9 to 12,” she once said, “and spend the rest of the day recuperating.”

A self‐portrait hanging in the family living room stressed Miss O’Connor's plain features. Sharing the painting is a peacock that, like Miss O’Connor, stares forward harshly.

In rating her among the most promising of the current generation of writers, critics frequently attempted to categorize her talent in terms of the South or her religious outlook. She did not object, but declared: “My characters are not sociological types. I write ‘tales’ in the sense Hawthorne wrote tales—though I hope with less reliance on allegory. I’m interested in the old Adam. He just talks Southern because I do.”

Miss O’Connor was graduated from the Woman's College of Georgia, in Milledgeville, and in 1947 received a master's degree in Fine Arts from the University of Iowa. Her work at the Writer's Workshop there directed by Paul Engle resulted in publication. Stories appeared in such journals as the Sewannee Review, Harper's Bazaar, Partisan Review, and Kenyon Review, which last year published a special collection of appreciation and criticism of Miss O’Connor.

Her first novel, “Wise Blood,” published by Harcourt, Brace in 1952, was generally praised by the critics. Ten of her stories were published by Harcourt, Brace in 1955 under the title, “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”

Her awards included O. Henry citations in 1955 and 1957, and a Ford Foundation grant in 1959.

Miss O’Connor's first‐floor workroom was crammed with books and journals ranging from Faulkner to weekly Catholic newspapers. She read and reread the Bible, and made frequent allegorical comments in her stories. “The Violent Bear It Away,” for example, is from Matthew, 11:12.

A collection of stories to be published next February by Farrar, Straus & Co. is entitled “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” This is a line from the writings of the late Jesuit anthropologist and philosopher, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

Miss O’Connor's full name was Mary Flannery O’Connor, but she dropped the first name by choice many years ago.