Much of this information was excerpted from work by Michael Skube
Mary Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1925. (Her childhood home has been kept as a monument to her work.) 5-year-old Mary Flannery O'Connor taught a chicken to walk backwards. O'Connor attended Women's College of Georgia (now Georgia College), receiving her A.B. in 1945. She then attended the State University of Iowa for her M.F.A. in 1947
The first signs of lupus, the
degenerative disease from
which her father had died,
appeared when she was 26.
She had left Georgia a few
years before, a writer whose
future held only promise. After
the disease was diagnosed, she
lived the life of an invalid for
13 years. Cared for by her
mother, Regina, she seldom
traveled but enjoyed company,
wrote three hours every day
and oversaw a yard full of
peacocks, geese and ducks.
"She knew she
hadn't much time," her cousin,
Louise Florencourt, said
recently. "She was totally
centered."
Flannery O'Connor lived what seemed to have been the life of a celibate, a naturally shy woman whose main interest in life was not men. Once she was stricken, Fitzgerald says, O'Connor decided marriage would be out of the question. But she recalls that someone once wrote O'Connor saying it was obvious from her stories she had never been married or been in love. "She wrote him," Fitzgerald says, "that it was 'obvious you don't understand what you read because I've been in love many times.'"The truth, according to a close friend, was that "Flannery was in love more than once, but never to anyone who was in love with her."
She was a devout Catholic in a region devoutly Protestant. She bore no children, she never married, she held no full-time job. From the day she graduated from the Georgia College for Women in 1945, she was a writer.
O'Connor has been described as a writer who strikes many as slightly perverse if not downright misanthropic. Although shy, she could also be what we today call judgmental. At a literary party once in New York, she was uncomfortable in the company of intellectuals - she called them "innerleckchuls" - and for hours she said nothing. O'Connor was also noted for her biting humor: Celestine Sibley, the Journal-Constitution's popular columnist, remembers a day when she and O'Connor were on a panel together at Emory University. The subject was writing. "She got up to the podium," Sibley says, "and said, `If y'all are wanting to know about margins and what color ink to use, I don't want to fool with with you.'" O'Connor wrote hundreds of letters, and one of her friends complained that she'd answer "any damned crank who wrote her." She answered a few cranks, but mostly she struck up epistolary friendships with perfect strangers. In one of her letters, she wrote "My audience are people who think God is dead."
Her letters revealed her
character and personality:she was direct,
offhand, sharply observant of
people and social custom. She
found humor in human folly,
and saw much of it in
advertising and in newspapers.
Her humor was not always
without a certain scorn.One friend said that O'Connor was fascinated "with Hadacol
advertisements, birth
announcements of infants with
names that had to be read to be
believed, such news items as
the attendence of Roy Rogers's
horse at a church service in
California, or the wonderful
mugs of a gospel quartet
promised as a Coming
Attraction somewhere. Did she read the tabloids of her
day? No one seems to know.
But Lorena Bobbitt and her
Bobbittized spouse were
O'Connor material if ever
anything was. When some nuns gave her a
television as a gift, she found
that she enjoyed it.
At her death on Aug. 3, 1964, she was four months shy of 40, the author of two novels, about 30 short stories, a handful of essays and hundreds of letters. At Piedmont Hospital three months before she died, she hid unfinished manuscripts under her pillow so her nurses and doctors wouldn't take them from her. Much of her work was published posthumously. In her 39 years, she contributed a brief, powerful canon (2 novels, 31 short stories, plus reviews and commentaries) that is still studied, and O'Connor is considered one of the most important voices in American literature.
Read "A Good Man is Hard to Find"
O'Connor's short story is a masterpiece of character development and plot twist. By the end of the story, we are left with some complex questions about faith, salvation, and the reasons people meet the fate they do. As you read the story, pay particular attention to the interaction between the two key characters--the grandmother and "The Misfit." Their dialogue, not often easy to understand, is rich in meaning and irony.
Essay #7, your final exam, will be written in two hours in the English Department Computer Writing Lab. Expect to write three pages double spaced.
View Credit Assignment #8 Instructions
View Credit Assignment #9 Instructions