Flannery O'Conner

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Flannery O’Conner

Flannery (Mary) O’Connor was an American writer, whose novels and short stories focused on humanities spiritual problems and the non-existent care for redemption earned her a unique place in 20th-century American fiction.

She was born in Savannah, Georgia, she was educated at the Georgia State College for Women and the State University of Iowa (now we know it as University of Iowa). Most of her life was spent in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she raised peacocks and wrote. O'Connor's work, essentially two novels and two volumes of short stories, has been described as an unlikely mixture of southern Gothic, prophecy, and evangelistic Roman Catholicism. The novels are Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960); the short-story collections are A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything that Rises Must Converge (published posthumously, 1965). O'Connor is frequently compared to the American novelist William Faulkner for her portrayal of southern character and milieu and to the Austrian writer Franz Kafnka for her preoccupation with gross things that most don’t like to think about. A basic theme of her work is the individual's vain attempt to escape the grace of God, and her work is profoundly and pervasively religious. She died of lupus, a disease that crippled her for the last ten years of her life.

We of course know her best (or at least I do) for her short story A Good Man is Hard to Find (!955). A Good Man is Hard to Find is consistent with Mary Flannery O'Connor's view that contemporary society was drastically changing for the worse. O'Connor's obvious displeasure with society at the time has often been attributed to her Catholic religion, her studies in the social science field, and the fact that the celebrated lifestyles of the elite southern whites were "Gone with the Wind.” Evidence of society's "demise" is woven into the story, and presented through an interesting generation ga...