Flannery O’Connor
1925 – 1964

Flannery O’Connor, in her short life, left a small and precious body of writing in which the voices of displaced persons affirm the grace of God in the grotesqueries of the world. That these voices speak with a Southern accent in a Georgia setting is our good fortune.

Born Mary Flannery O’Connor in Savannah in 1925, she spent a serene childhood there, although a series of displacements lay ahead in her growing years. Her family were staunch Roman Catholics, a small religious minority in the South. Even as a child in parochial school, she was aware of being regarded as somehow different, although Savannah was where most Georgia Catholics lived at that time. In her mature years as a writer, many of her artistic contemporaries regarded any kind of orthodoxy as freakish, but she never lost her vital connection to her faith and her Church, and never lost the courage of her convictions, whether as a Catholic or an artist.

The great Depression and the illness of her father brought the first major displacement in her life. When business reverses forced her family to leave Savannah, her father found a position in Atlanta. After a few months in the city, she and her mother moved to the ancestral home in more insular Milledgeville, the father coming down on weekends. They shared the house with two maiden aunts, a great-aunt, an uncle and a boarder, with a stream of uncles and cousins coming and going. The only child on hand, she grew accustomed to living in the setting of a lively extended family.

The most painful displacement was the death of her father when she was fifteen. He had suffered a long, slow decline from lupus, an incurable disease in which a person’s immune system goes awry. If uncontrolled, it destroys vital parts of the body. Medical advances made it more tractable in time, but the same genetic disease was to take the daughter’s life twenty-four years later.

She finished high school in Milledgeville and attended Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College & State University) just a block from her home. She graduated with a major in Sociology, but the writing of fiction had been her real interest ever since childhood. With good advice from teachers, she entered the Writers Workshop at the State University of Iowa, and took a Master of Fine Arts degree. Then she was invited to continue her work at Yaddo, the artists’ colony of the Trask Foundation at Saratoga Spring, New York. In both situations she made great strides with her writing and met a number of literary people with whom she formed lifelong friendships. Among those were: her future editor, Robert Giroux; the poet, Robert Fitzgerald, and his wife with whose family she lived for two years in the Connecticut countryside and whom she called her “adopted kin;” and the novelist, Caroline Gordon, to whom she continued to send her work for criticism as long as she lived. Gifted as she was, Flannery O’Connor did not have the self-destructive pride that refuses to accept help from others.

Her brief literary career was a race against time. The symptoms of lupus appeared just as she was finishing her first novel, Wise Blood. The disease progressed with occasional remissions. But, in fact it was only restrained by a medication that simultaneously damaged her bone structure. Aware of the fragility of her existence, she wrote and revised with tireless intensity. But two collections of stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge, and a second novel, The Violent Bear It Away, were all she was able to finish. The Fitzgeralds posthumously published her occasional prose in a collection entitled Mystery & Manners. Some years later Sally Fitzgerald edited and published a selection of her celebrated letters under the title, The Habit of Being. Unfortunately, Flannery O’Connor’s work did not receive its highest honors until after her death, but her reputation has grown steadily and, today, she is everywhere recognized as one of the most important American writers of this century.

During her most creative years, also the years of her physical decline, she lived on a family farm outside Milledgeville, attended by a great flock of peacocks she loved to raise. She was a warmly receptive person who maintained her sharp sense of humor despite poor health. She died in Milledgeville in 1964 and is buried there near her father. Toward the end of her life she wrote:

The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make them appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal ways of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock ~ to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the blind you draw large and startling figures.

Her “shocking” message was, and is, “Behold, the dwelling of God is with men!”

Georgia Women of Achievement
First Induction Ceremony
Macon, Georgia
March 23, 1992