Mary Flannery O’Connor

Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) Born in Savannah, Georgia, O'Connor was educated at the Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College and State University) and the State University of Iowa (now University of Iowa). Most of her life was spent in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she raised peacocks and wrote. Her original major was art. She was an accomplished cartoonist with a style similar to James Thurber. Died at age 39 in Milledgeville hospital of complications from Lupus, a rheumatoid disease. Her father died of the same disease when Flannery was 15.

Andalusia Farm

Southern Gothic or Southern Grotesque O’Connor’s work is labeled as "Southern Gothic" or "Southern Grotesque." Responding to this genre designation, O'Connor's once said that, "anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.”

Humor and Grotesque O'Connor also is considered a humorous. Literary critic Mark Steadman of Clemson University notes that, "Southern humor, like much of the best southern writing in general, has been boisterous and physical, often grotesque, and generally realistic"

O’Connor with her peacocks Andalusia Farm Foundation still keeps peacocks. Peacocks often figure prominently in O’Connor’s work. In “The Displaced Person” the image of the peacock is related as a historic symbol of the divine. The “eye of God” can be seen in its feathers.

Works Wise Blood ( 1952 ). Novel A Good Man is Hard to Find ( 1955 ). The Violent Bear It Away ( 1960 ). Novel. Everything That Rises Must Converge ( 1965 ). Novel. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1969. The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor. With an introduction by Robert Giroux. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1972. The Habit of Being, a collection of O’Connor’s letters edited by Sally Fitzgerald.

Startling Figures “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.” — Flannery O'Connor

A Good Man is Hard to Find This is one of O’Connor’s most shocking short stories, although most of her stories are shocking. It is through the story's disturbing ending that O'Connor raises fundamental questions about good and evil, morality and immorality, faith and doubt, and the particularly Southern "binaries" of black and white and Southern history and progress (Old South versus New South).

Grace O’Connor wrote stories that are hard to forget. Whether for their humor, brilliant characterization, local color, or shocking plots, Flannery O'Connor's short stories, "in which the voices of displaced persons affirm the grace of God in the grotesqueries of the world," continue to disturb and resonate. As O'Connor said herself, her stories "make [her] vision apparent by shock

Works Cited Various photos. Andalusia Farm/Flannery O’Connor Foundation. Spring 2011. PDF. Fitzgerald, Sally, Ed. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Fitzgerald. Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1969. Print. Henney, Pamela. At Andalusia. Spring 2011. JPEG. Pope, Robert. O’Connor and Malamud. University of Akron, Spring 2010.