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 American
writer particularly acclaimed for her stories, which combined the
comic with the tragic. Along with writers like Carson McCullers
and Eudora Welty, O'Connor belongs to the Southern Gothic tradition
that focused on the decaying south. O'Connor's body of work is 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, and this shaped her 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, and for many years the mayor of Milledgeville. He later worked
for a construction company and died in 1941. Her mother, Regina
L. (Cline) O'Connor, came from a prominent family in the state.
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. 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
and published her first short story "The Geranium", at the age of
21 . In the following year she received a Master of Fine Arts in
Literature degree. After another year at the university she moved
to an apartment hotel in New York, and published four chapters of
Wise Blood in Mademoiselle, Sewanee Review,
and Partisan Review in 1948 and 1949. The complete novel
appeared in 1952. It dealt with a young religious enthusiast, who
attempts to establish a church without Christ. O'Connor's second
novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960), had a similar subject
matter.
 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 fierce
black hat. He is accompanied by bizarre villains such as Asa Hawks,
who pretends to have blinded himself, and Sabbath Lily, his daughter
who turns into a monster of sexual voracity, and the fox-faced young
Enoch Emery, who steals a mummy from a museum , which he thinks
of as "the new Jesus." Enoch knows things because "He had wise
blood like his daddy." Eventually Enoch finds his religious
fulfilment 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 the Essex, and faces his cul-de-sac.
In 1950 O'Connor suffered her first attack of disseminated lupus,
a debilitating blood disease that had killed her father. She returned
to Milledgeville where she lived with her mother. In spite of the
illness, O'Connor continued to write and occasionally lectured about
creative writing in colleges. She read such contemporary thinkers
as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-195) and Hannah Arendt (1906-1975).
Among her friends were Robert Lowell, Caroline Gordon, Katherine
Ann Porter and John Hawkes.
From 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 imaginative prose
and 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.
 O'Connor's
short stories have been considered her finest work. With A Good
Man Is Hard to Find (1955) she came to be regarded as a master
of the form. In the story "Good Country People" a young woman with
a sense of moral superiority experiences her downfall. The protagonist,
Joy Hopewell, has an artificial leg as a result of a hunting accident.
She has changed her name legally from Joy to Hulga. Joy-Hulga tries
to seduce a Bible salesman, a seemingly simple country boy. He turns
out to be another Hazel Motes and disappears with her artificial
leg. "The Artificial Nigger" is a lesson about injustice.
In the melodrama an escaped criminal called the Misfit casually
wipes out a family. O'Connor's short stories however do not contain
the same so strong theological reference as her novels. They often
focus on grotesque characters, have a crisp humour, and are open
to interpretation. Recurrent images include flaming suns, mutilated
eyes, peacocks (which she raised in Milledgeville), and the colourful
shirts, bright blue suits and stern black hats of preachers.
For further reading: The Added Dimensions, ed. by M.J.
Friedman and L.A. Lawson (1966); The Eternal Crossroads: The Art
of Flannery O'Connor by L.V. Driskell and J.T. Brittain (1971);
Flannery O'Connor by K. Feeley (1972); Nightmares and Visions
by G.H. Muller (1972); Invisible Parade: The Fiction of Flannery
O'Connor by M. Orvell (1972); The Pruning Word by J.R. May (1976);
Flannery O'Connor by D.T. McFarland (1976); Flannery O'Connor's
Dark Comedies by C. Shloss (1980); Conversations With Flannery
O'Connor by Rosemary M. Magee (1987); American Gargoyles: Flannery
O'Connor and the Medieval Grotesque by Anthony Di Renzo (1993);
The True Country: Themes in the Fiction of Flannery O'Connor by
Carter W. Martin (1994); Flannery O'Connor: New Perspectives,
ed. by Sura Prasad Rath and Mary Neff Shaw (1996); Writing Against
God: Language As Message in the Literature of Flannery O'Connor
by Joanne Halleran McMullen (1996); Flannery O'Connor; The Woman,
the Thinker, the Visionary by īTed R. Spivey (1997); Flannery
O'Connor's Characters by Laurence Enjolras (1998); Flannery O'Connor:
Comprehensive Research and Study Guide, ed. by Harold Bloom (1999);
Flannery O'Connor, Hermit Novelist by Richard Giannone (2000)
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