Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor was the only child of devout Catholic parents Regina Cline and Edward Francis O'Connor, Jr. Born March 25, 1925 in Savannah, Georgia, and raised in Milledgeville, Georgia, Flannery O’Connor was a true Southern girl. O’Connor believed “Southern writers are stuck with the South, and it’s a very good thing to be stuck with.” She attributed the popularity of the Southern writer to the fact that Southerners possessed a story-telling tradition. “When a Southerner wants to make a point,” she once told an interviewer, “he tells a story; it’s actually his way of reasoning and dealing with experience.” However, O’Connor did not think of herself as a Southern writer noting that her “people could come from anywhere, but naturally since I know the South, they speak with a Southern accent.” Indeed they do, and in addition, they speak with “simplicity of truth with its color and nuance.”Not only did O'Connor use a southern setting for her stories, but also Christian symbolism. Although she never claimed to be a theologian, she was probably one of the greatest Christian writers of the 20th century. O'Connor combines religion and grotesque characters to point to God's grace. In her collection of essays, Habit of Being, O'Connor explains in a letter to recipient "A" on April 4, 1958, "All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it." Indeed, O'Connor uses very unlikely characters to show God's grace to her readers. She did not write to tell people how to feel, but more so used emblematic writing to show an instant of repentance, conversion and grace in a moment of peril and pain.At age 25, while living in New York, O'Connor was diagnosed with Lupus, the same disease that killed her father. As her condition worsened, she moved back to her family farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she lived and wrote for the remaining years of her life. This permanant retreat gave her the valuable gift of time, allowing her to focus on her writing. She kept close contact with friends, new and old, through letters, which have been collected into the book The Habit of Being by friend and editor, Sally Fitzgerald. It is through this collection of letters one can really come to know the Hermit Novelist.On August 3, 1964, O'Connor died at the very young age of 39. Although gone physically, her writings live on giving following generations the chance to see it is not necessary to dress up the gospel in designer suits and that repentance and grace comes to us on all levels.This page is dedicated to O'Connor, her love of theology and her picture of grace as experienced through the human condition.(quotes resource: Magee, Rosemary M, ed. Conversations with Flannery O’Connor. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987.)
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