Flannery O'Connor: Biographical Sketch

Flannery O’Connor, a devout Catholic writer from the U.S. South, published two novels and a collection of short stories in her lifetime. Mary Flannery O’Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1925 to Catholic parents of Irish descent, Edward Francis and Regina (Cline) O’Connor. In 1931, O'Connor started first grade at St. Vincent’s Grammar School for Girls, a parochial school run by the Sisters of Mercy close to the O’Connor family's residence in Lafayette Square. To begin sixth grade, Regina controversially transferred her daughter to Sacred Heart School, run by the same nuns who taught Regina in high school, the more educated Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet. Eventually, Edward’s work took him to Atlanta, and so the family moved to Milledgeville, a small town roughly 90 miles outside Atlanta, where O'Connor attended Peabody Elementary School. Eventually, O'Connor attended North Fulton High School in Atlanta, but she disliked the school and transferred to Peabody High School back in Milledgeville, where she graduated in 1942. Unfortunately, the year before, Edward passed away from lupus erythematosus, an autoimmune disease where the body’s immune system attacks its own organs. Then, in 1945, O'Connor graduated with a Bachelors of Arts in social science from the Georgia State College for Women in Milledgeville.

In the fall of 1945, O'Connor submitted writing samples to Paul Engle, the director of the University of Iowa’s Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a graduate writing program. She was accepted into the program, and she published her first short story, “The Geranium,” in 1946. In 1947, O'Connor received her Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa. Encouraged by friends and colleagues at Iowa to apply for a residency at the prestigious Yaddo artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, O'Connor's application was approved in the spring of 1948, and she arrived at Yaddo that summer. While there, O'Connor completed and published the first chapters of her first novel, Wise Blood. She stayed at Yaddo through 1945 and then went to live with her friends Sally and Robert Fitzgerald at their home in Connecticut, where she continued to write. While staying with the Fitzgeralds, O'Connor became seriously ill in December 1950 at the age of 25 with her first attack of what would later be diagnosed as lupus, the same disease that took her father’s life almost ten years earlier. Literary critic Harold Bloom notes that "while she will be able, by the use of drugs, to control the disease somewhat, it will eventually kill her" (145).

The following spring, in 1951, O'Connor returned to Georgia. Scholar Rosemary M. Magee writes that, due to her declining health, O'Connor and her mother moved from the family mansion, called the Cline Mansion, in Milledgeville "to Andalusia, a dairy farm near Milledgeville. Flannery convalesced and began raising peafowl" (xxv). Several years prior, in 1946, Bernard Cline, Regina’s brother and O'Connor's uncle, passed away and bequeathed his farm, Andalusia, to his sister. O'Connor spent the remainder of her life there with her mother, continuing to raise peafowl and writing despite the persistent, gradual decline of her health.

In 1952, O'Connor finally published her first novel, Wise Blood. The following year, O'Connor applied for and received in December the Kenyon Review fiction fellowship of two thousand dollars and then received the second place 1954 O’Henry Award for her short story “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” the next spring. In 1955, O'Connor published her first collection of short stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, which included “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” the collection's namesake, as well as “The River,” “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “A Stroke of Good Fortune,” “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” “The Artificial Nigger,” “A Circle in the Fire,” “A Late Encounter with the Enemy,” “Good Country People,” and “The Displaced Person." One story from the collection, “A Circle in the Fire,” received the second place 1955 O’Henry Award. In the same year that O'Connor received the National Institute of Arts and Letters grant, her story “Greenleaf” also received the first place 1957 O’Henry Award.

Because of O'Connor's continually declining health, Katie Semmes, O'Connor's distant cousin and neighbor to the family when they lived in Lafayette Square in Savannah, paid for O'Connor and Regina to travel to Lourdes, France for three weeks in April and May of 1958. Biographer Brad Gooch chronicles that, "hearing of the Lourdes Centennial Pilgrimage – organized as a package tour by the Diocese of Savannah, to the site of Bernadette Soubirous's vision of the Virgin Mary in the south of France – Cousin Katie Semmes immediately thought of Mary Flannery, and her worsening condition. Knowing the reputation of Bernadette's spring for physical cures, she insisted on paying the $1,050.40 per-person fee to send both mother and daughter" (297). After the pilgrimage, Regina and O'Connor traveled to Rome, where they were part of a large group who had an audience with Pope Pius XII in Saint Peter’s Basilica. When the Pope mingled with audience members to give greetings, he gave a special blessing to O'Connor, who had been using crutches for some time due to the lupus.

The following year, in 1959, O’Connor, along with eight other writers, one of whom was her friend Robert Fitzgerald, received a prestigious Ford Foundation fellowship grant for eight thousand dollars. Then, in 1960, O'Connor published her second and final novel, The Violent Bear It Away. During the final years of her life, O'Connor's health continued to deteriorate, but she continued to write, with her short story “Everything That Rises Must Converge” winning the first place 1962 O’Henry Award. However, in 1964, O'Connor's health worsened, and she died on August 3, 1964 at the age of 39 in Milledgeville Hospital, in the same year that her short story “Revelation” won the first place O’Henry Award.

Several pieces of O'Connor's writing were published posthumously. In 1965, the year after her death, her second collection of short stories was published and included the collection’s namesake “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” “Greenleaf,” “A View of the Woods,” “The Enduring Chill,” “The Comforts of Home,” “The Lame Shall Enter First,” “Revelation,” “Parker’s Back,” and “Judgement Day.” In 1969, Mystery and Manners: The Occasional Prose of Flannery O’Connor, a collection of some of her unpublished essays, lectures, and critical articles, was published. In 1971, O'Connor's publisher Robert Giroux released The Complete Stories, a chronological collection containing all thirty-one of O'Connor's short stories, through his publishing company, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. In 1972, the collection won the prestigious National Book Award in Fiction. Later, in 1979, Regina O’Connor and Robert Giroux published The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor, a collection of O'Connor's letters and correspondence written over the course of her lifetime.

Ultimately, Flannery O’Connor was known for her influence on the world of fiction as a female writer from the U.S. South and a devout Catholic. Although her life was cut short at the age of 39 by lupus, the same terminal disease that took her father’s life when she was in high school, O'Connor still managed to publish two novels and a collection of short stories, as well as to write a series of other stories. Moreover, important figures in her life, such as her mother, Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, and her friend and publisher Robert Giroux, ensured that readers in the world of fiction would continue to experience O'Connor's writing by publishing all of her short stories in addition to essays and letters.

Works Cited

Bloom, Harold, editor. Modern Critical Views: Flannery O'Connor. New York, Chelsea House Publ., 1986.

Gooch, Brad. Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor. New York, Little, Brown, 2009.

Magee, Rosemary M., editor. Conversations with Flannery O'Connor. Jackson, UP of Mississippi, 1987.

McTyre, Joe. Flannery O'Connor on crutches, with one of her peacocks in Milledgeville, Georgia, July 1962. July 1962. Digital Collections: Georgia State University Library, Georgia State University, University Library, https://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/digital/collection/ajc/id/1978/rec/29.