Authors: Flannery O’Connor

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By the time O’Connor took her bachelor’s degree from Women’s College of Georgia in 1945, she knew what she wanted to do: go north to learn the craft of fiction. She was accepted at the prestigious creative writing program at the University of Iowa, earning her master of fine arts degree in 1947. O’Connor published several stories in prominent literary periodicals during her stay in Iowa, including "The Geranium" in Accent and "The Train" in The Sewanee Review. The latter story, a portion of the novel that would later be published as Wise Blood, won for her the Rinehart-Iowa fiction award in 1947.

On the strength of this award and her promise as a writer, O’Connor was offered a fellowship by the Yaddo Foundation, a philanthropic organization dedicated to supporting the arts. Upon accepting the fellowship, she spent several fruitful months at the Yaddo study center in Saratoga Springs, New York, in early 1949. The young and naïve O’Connor returned to Milledgeville soon thereafter, however, because of the turmoil erupting over procommunist accusations against another Yaddo guest writer. Her brief stay at Yaddo had, nevertheless, yielded important friendships with some prominent writers and editors—including the poet Robert Lowell, who introduced her to Robert Giroux, editor in chief at Harcourt Brace in New York—contacts that would be invaluable to her in her career.

After spending a few months back at her home, where she continued to work on Wise Blood, she accepted the invitation to move in with the Robert and Sally Fitzgerald family in Ridgefield, Connecticut. These friends of Giroux became her unofficial literary patrons and her surrogate brother and sister. Upon completion of her manuscript in 1950, O’Connor was offered a contract by Giroux.

The onset of lupus during Christmas, 1950, redirected her life back to Andalusia permanently, where under her mother’s watchful eye she did the rest of the editing for the book. Wise Blood was published in 1952 to the applause of astonished critics startled to find its initially nihilistic protagonist, Hazel Motes, the creation of a genteel, mild-mannered young southern woman. Motes exemplifies one of O’Connor’s main themes: that the mystery of free will is not the war between one will and another but of many wills conflicting in one character.

From her Milledgeville sanctuary, O’Connor continued to carry on a lively correspondence with friends, readers, critics, and her new editors at Farrar and Giroux in New York. When her health permitted, she made trips to colleges and universities to give readings and to lecture on literary craft. After O’Connor won The Kenyon Review Fellowship in fiction for 1953, her next project was the series of short stories that were collected in A Good Man Is Hard to Find in 1955. O’Connor filled this collection with dozens of well-wrought, "Christ-haunted" characters, among them one of her most memorable: Hulga, the one-legged doctor of philosophy of "Good Country People" who thinks that she has seduced a backwater Bible salesman, only to discover his country existentialism out-rationalizes her and has actually made her the fool.

An O. Henry first prize in short fiction and a National Institute of Arts and Letters grant followed, both in 1957. In 1958 she contracted with Farrar and Giroux for a new novel in progress, eventually published in 1960 as The Violent Bear It Away. Praised for its psychological realism, this work shows O’Connor returning to the theme of the antiquest found in Wise Blood. The protagonist, Francis Marion Tarwater, runs away from a prophetic career ordained by his deceased uncle until, unable to escape the call of God, he succumbs; he ends up drowning a young boy in order to save his soul, the enduring Christian symbol of death in life.

O’Connor spent the last months of her life, from 1963 to 1964, completing the stories that eventually were published in her 1965 posthumous collection, Everything That Rises Must Converge, the title derived from a key concept in the work of French Catholic theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. These stories, like those of A Good Man Is Hard to Find, feature familiar O’Connor protagonists, souls torn between heaven and hell, looking for solace in self-willed religion or high-handed and vain intellectualism.

Since O'Connor's death, several volumes of her previously unpublished materials have been published that amplify the quality of her fiction and the nature of her achievement as well as provide insight into her buoyant personality. These include a collection of cartoons made before she embarked on her literary career, as well as a deeply personal prayer journal. Yet it is the enduring strength of her fiction that keeps her in the critical eye. Few postmodern writers have written with as clear a vision of their audience as O’Connor did. For "the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures," she said, alluding to the grotesque imagery that she employed to communicate her Christian orthodoxy to readers no longer conversant with common Christian symbols. Her fiction was calculated to subvert the habitualization of Christian truth, to raise such notions as sin, redemption, and resurrection out of the realm of the commonplace and into the modern consciousness. For her, there was no middle ground, no neutral corner, and her most admiring critics were often the irreligious intellectuals whom she parodied in her fiction.

Attempts have continually been made to place O'Connor's fiction into some convenient pigeonhole: southern gothic, Catholic grotesque, the school of southern degeneracy, and so on; however, her work resists such facile generalization. Her themes, admittedly repetitious, were best suited to the medium of the short story, where her sharp, shocking characterization could have full impact upon the reader. However, her recreations of the southern disposition, its religiosity, and its distinctive orality were too vivid, her spiritual vision too piercing to be ultimately embodied by a single critical label. O’Connor’s reputation remains intact as one of the most important southern writers of the twentieth century.