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(Mary Flannery O'Connor)
born on March 25, 1925 in Savannah, Georgia/ United States
died on August 3, 1964 in Milledgeville, Georgia/ United States
American writer
100th birthday on March 25, 2025
Biography
Flannery O'Connor was born in 1925 in the port city of Savannah, Georgia as the only child of Regina and Edward O'Connor. Her parents were both of Irish descent and belonged to the Catholic minority in Georgia. The Catholic faith played a key role in the life and work of Flannery O'Connor: whenever she could, she attended Mass early in the morning and her stories and novels often feature the “chosen” who are struck by divine grace. In her view, “all human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and change is painful” (The Habit of Being). She wrote literature that “serves as the axe for the frozen sea within us” (Kafka).
Her father was a real estate agent and aged 26 when in 1922 he married Regina Cline, a woman of the same age who came from a large and affluent family. His business suffered during the Great Depression of the 1930s, although his struggles at work may have in part also been due to the autoimmune disease – systemic lupus erythematosus – that troubled him. He succumbed to the illness when Flannery was only 15 years old, and his death was a severe blow for her. He had been loving and always supportive throughout her childhood; the two had enjoyed a very close relationship. It was her father who kept all of her first poems and drawings and who would proudly pass them around when company visited. Later Flannery was to recognize in him a kindred spirit and she believed that he too would have relished being a writer had he not needed to continue to soldier on in the real estate business to provide for the family.
Due to his illness, the family moved in 1938 from the coast further inland to Milledgeville, where her mother's family owned several properties. Flannery attended the local high school and then went on to study at Georgia State College for Women. Accelerated studies were possible during the war and after only three years she graduated with a B.A. in sociology. A teacher who had recognized her talent obtained a scholarship for her for the Master’s program at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. Initially, O’Connor had planned on a career in journalism, but she decided to try her hand as a writer after receiving encouragement from Paul Engle, who ran the Iowa Writers' Workshop and who was very impressed by her literary work.
She received her M.F.A. (Master of Fine Arts) in 1947 for a collection of short stories and she then immediately set about establishing herself as a professional writer: she looked for a good literary agent; she continued working on her first novel (individual chapters of which she placed as short stories with renowned literary journals); and she submitted applications for literary grants as well as for grants for board and lodging in artists' colonies such as Yaddo (in Saratoga Springs, NY). She also made many important, sometimes lifelong, contacts with writers. One of the most important among these was the start of a lasting friendship with Robert Lowell, a poet who in turn introduced her to her future publisher Robert Giroux as well as to the two Catholic writers Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. The Fitzgeralds rented O'Connor a studio above the garage on a property they owned in Connecticut and she was to appoint them as her literary executors.
At the end of 1950 and in the midst of this new beginning, O'Connor contracted lupus. However, she did not learn that she suffered from the same disease as her father had until mid-1952 when Sally Fitzgerald revealed the diagnosis to her. Both her mother and her doctors had preferred to shield her from the truth.
Doctors had “given” her seven years, but in fact she lived for another twelve years, throughout which she worked assiduously on her writing and on her career. She wrote tirelessly until the end, completing her last short story on her deathbed.
Regina O'Connor had inherited an estate on the outskirts of Milledgeville in 1947 – Andalusia, with 544 acres of farmland and over 1,000 acres of woodland. The farm became both a refuge and source of income for mother and daughter as, although Flannery’s writing brought her more and more fame, it was the mother who earned the money they needed by running a successful dairy business and selling Shetland ponies. O'Connor’s task on the farm was to see to the poultry she had always loved – she had preferred chickens as a girl but later developed a fondness for the peafowl that became her favorite birds.
O'Connor was entirely dependent on her mother's support and feared nothing more than Regina (as she always addressed her mother) dying before her. In O'Connor's work, there are numerous female farm owners with unmarried daughters whom the mothers are desperate to marry off. O’Connor describes extremely tense relationships and the latent horrors that lurk in the everyday life the mothers and daughters share. On the one hand, there is the brilliant daughter who is unable to fend for herself and who produces “strange stories about unsympathetic people” bringing “disrepute” to her own mother and her entire family – while enjoying international acclaim. On the other hand, there is the ordinary mother, capable and loving – burdened with caring for her daughter for as long as she lives.
Flannery O'Connor worked very carefully and slowly, but over just 18 years she created a literary oeuvre that continues to radiate to this day and whose importance is increasingly recognized. She published two novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960) as well as two volumes of short stories, A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (posthumously, 1965). She received the National Book Award for Fiction posthumously in 1972 for her Collected Stories.
A significant part of her work consists of letters. She received many letters, not only from colleagues such as Robert Lowell, Katherine Anne Porter, Elizabeth Bishop and many others, but also from her readers – and she answered all of them! The letters were published in 1979, 15 years after her death, under the title The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor. The literary critic Richard Gilman said of these letters: “To compare her with the great letter writers in our language… would have elicited from her one of her famous steely glances, but Byron, Keats, Lawrence, Wilde and Joyce come irresistibly to mind.”
O'Connor's work was wrested from a debilitating illness that slowly destroyed her from the inside out. She wrote amidst loving individuals in an environment where literature played no role, and the stories she created remained strange and foreign to her mother, her countless relatives and to the entire small-town and rural population in and around Milledgeville. It seems that these deeply contradictory living and working conditions were the ideal breeding ground for Flannery O'Connor’s stories. She wrote always in the spirit of her faith, and in laconic prose that often revealed her sardonic sense of humor: “What people don't realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.” (Flannery O'Connor).
Instead of “religion/faith” she might as well have written “writing/literature”.
(Text from 2024; translated with DeepL.com; edited by Ramona Fararo, 2025. Please consult the German version for additional information, pictures, sources, videos, and bibliography.)
Quotes
Her book of essays, Mystery and Manners, which is primarily concerned with the moral imperatives of the serious writer of fiction, is the best of its kind I have ever read. (Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens)
In a sense sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow. Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don't have it miss one of God's mercies. (Flannery O'Connor)
All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and change is painful. (Flannery O'Connor)
What people don't realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. (Flannery O'Connor)
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