Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O’Connor (1925 - 1964)

Author
Prophet of Letters
Literary Rebel

“Grace changes us and the change is painful”

In a post-war America crowded with great Southern regional writers tinged with Gothic elements such as Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers and Harper Lee, one seems to continually stand out. Flannery O’Connor grabs every new generation and holds their attention through a combination of her writing virtuosity, premature death and the Catholic faith upon which rested the totality of her life.

O’Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia to parents of Irish descent. Her father, a real estate agent, was diagnosed with Lupus and died shortly after the family moved to Andalusia Farm in Milledgeville, Georgia. She began writing at an early age with a talent for cartooning which, along with her naturally wry sense of humor helped form the basis for the sardonic and surreal nature of the characters who populated her mature writing.

In 1946, O’Connor was accepted into the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa, which was the crucible for her talent and connected her with mentors and fellow writers and literary critics who gave her direction, advice and support. After polishing her work at several other workshops and writer’s colonies, O’Connor began writing and publishing her work to surprisingly widespread respect and success.

In her short stories (which proved to be her true métier) and later her novels such as Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960), O’Connor explored the dark corners of humanity and the element of “the grotesque” that was a fashionable adjunct of Southern Regional writing in the post-war period. The grotesque, the surreal, the misfit and the violent all were seen through a lens that made the reader re-think the nature of good and evil. What separated O’Connor was that these elements were seen by the Catholic ideas of grace and the power and potential acts of redemption inherent in all fallen humanity.

O’Connor’s distinctly Catholic aesthetic was not lost on the reading public and the secular critics who praised the power and substance of her very novel voice. Early influences on O’Connor were the contemporary Catholic philosophers Jacques Maritain and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin as well as Thomas Aquinas and his notions of God acting in the world and the effects of grace upon the soul and body. O’Connor would come to influence contemporary and later Catholic writers such as Thomas Merton and Annie Dillard.

Diagnosed with Lupus, the same disease that killed her father, Flannery lived with her mother, Regina, at their farm in Milledgeville surrounded by the peacocks she loved her entire life. Despite the pain and suffering brought on by her condition, O’Connor continued to write and even lecture and read her works but by the early 60s she was in almost constant pain. She supported the candidacy and presidency of John F. Kennedy and the Civil Rights protests of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Flannery O’Connor died on August 3, 1964.

The Flannery O'Connor tile was created in 2021. Our 12" X 12" signed and numbered reproduction is created on stretch canvas and is suitable for matting and framing.