Flannery O’Connor.
-(1925 – 1964)
-American novelist, short story writer
-Roman Catholic
Flannery O’Connor’s work has been described as “profane, blasphemous, and outrageous.” Her stories are peopled by a sordid caravan of murderers and thieves, prostitutes and bigots whose lives are punctuated by horror and sudden violence. However, perhaps the most shocking thing about Flannery O’Connor’s fiction is that a Christian vision shapes it. If the world she depicts is dark and terrifying, it is also the place where grace makes itself known. Her world—our world—is the stage where the divine comedy plays out; the freakishness and violence in O’Connor’s stories, so often mistaken for a kind of hostility or even nihilism, turn out to be a call to mercy (The Terrible Speed of Mercy: A Spiritual Biography of Flannery by Jonathan Rogers).
“Dear Lord, please make me want You. It would be the greatest bliss. Not just to want You when I think about it, but to want You all the time, to think about You all the time, to have the want driving in me, to have it like a cancer in me. It would kill me like a cancer and that would be the Fulfillment.”
Biography of Flannery O'Connor, American Novelist, Short-Story Writer by Claire Carroll (article)
Andalusia: Home of Flannery O'Connor (website) - you can visit her home in Milledgeville, GA.
Uncommon Grace: The Life of Flannery O'Connor (website) - An award-winning documentary about America's master short storyteller.
Hosea and Flannery O’Connor by Chad Bird (article + audio) - To explain the startling language she often employed in her writings, Flannery O’Connor once said, “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.” Hosea and O’Connor would have been literary pals.
Flannery O’Connor’s Writings: A Guide for the Perplexed by Michael M. Jordan (article) - explores four features that attract readers to her work and three reasons for her enduring stature among readers, teachers, and critics.
Flannery O’Connor: A Reading Primer by Adrian Van Young (article) - Adrian provides an O’Connor crash course and tips for reading this eccentric writer.
The Promise of Flawed Characters by Joe Fassler (article) - author Paul Lisicky describes how Flannery O’Connor pulls her subjects apart to make them stronger as he looks closely at the short story “Revelation.”
Scale Highly Eccentric: A Written and Illustrated Tribute to the Talent and Toughness of Flannery O’Connor (article + audio) - five writers, ranging from a 15-year-old high schooler to retired journalists, embodied in their distinctive ways the legacy of Flannery O'Connor. The book includes 14 portraits and audio recordings to entertain you and give insight into O’Connor’s writings.
A Good Man is Hard to Find—Flannery O'Connor book review (video) - This story depicts the impact of Christ on the lives of two seemingly diverse characters. One character, the Misfit, characterizes Christianity as either giving up everything and following Christ or rejecting Him and doing as one pleases. Anything (murder, burning down someone’s house, etc) is permissible and constitutes the only true pleasure one can get from life.
Flannery O’Connor Reads ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ in Rare 1959 Audio (article + video)
Author Flannery O’Connor Captured on Film at Age 5, with Her Chickens (article + video) - Flannery taught her chicken to walk backward “to go forward so she can look behind to see where she went.” Learn the backstory.
Anatomy of a Cover: The Complete Works of Flannery O’Connor by J.C. Gable (article) - Discover the process used to redesign the covers of O’Connor’s five books. Choosing and designing a book cover is more complicated than it seems.
33 Portraits of Flannery O’Connor, Because Good Fan Art is Hard to Find by Emily Temple (article) - a delightful collection of portraits of Flannery O’Connor, from professional editorial illustrations to portraiture, currently for sale to simple fan art. Enjoy.
Flannery O’Connor is arguably America’s most excellent Christian writer. Why? Dr. Jessica Hooten Wilson unpacks her legacy, how her fiction explores ultimate truth, and how her work is just as insightful and challenging today as it was half a century ago.
Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor book review - This story is about Hazel Motes, who denies his Christianity and takes desperate measures to prove his disbelief. In this book, Flannery has shown her keen ability to present a primary theme of Christ's redemption of mankind.
The boy, Burk, would look off into the distance over the dark blue treeline where the world stretched out, hidden and at its ease. In the darkest most private part of his soul, hanging upsidedown like a sleeping bat, was the certain, undeniable knowledge that he was not hungry for the bread of life. Had the bush flamed for Moses, the sun stood still for Joshua, the lions turned aside before Daniel only to prophesy the bread of life? Jesus? He felt a terrible disappointment in that conclusion, a dread that it was true.
The short story "Revelation" by Flannery O'Connor is read in this episode. It tells the tale of a self-satisfied woman who encounters a nasty shock, forcing her to take stock of who she is. "Revelation" was written during the last year of her life, a time she knew she was dying from her fourteen-year battle with lupus. Shortly before her death, she was notified that her work won the first prize of the O. Henry Award in 1965.
Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood is…something. It is a complicated and strange novel. Wesley and Jared discuss Wise Blood, the difficulty of reading about complex characters, religion in O’Connor’s works, and much more.
Host Jacke Wilson tells the story of O’Connor’s life, her most famous works, and his near-connection to the author…before concluding with some troubling recent discoveries and a preview of a deeper examination of O’Connor and her place in American letters.
Gillespie and Riley read and discuss Flannery O’Connor’s short story, Good Country People. What does it mean that someone is a good Christian?
Gillespie and Riley return to O’Connor’s short story, Good Country People, to discuss faith, humility, and the uncomfortable truth about ourselves.
“To know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility.”
There are thirty-one stories included. O'Connor published her first story, "The Geranium," in 1946 while working on her master's degree at the University of Iowa. Arranged chronologically, this collection shows that her last story, "Judgement Day"--sent to her publisher shortly before her death―is a brilliantly rewritten and transfigured version of "The Geranium." These stories reveal a lively, penetrating talent that has given us some of the twentieth century's most influential and disturbing fiction.
Wise Blood is the story of Hazel Motes, a twenty-two-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his inborn, desperate fate. He falls under the spell of a "blind" street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate fifteen-year-old daughter, Sabbath Lily. In an ironic, malicious gesture of non-faith, Motes found the Church Without Christ but is still thwarted in his efforts to lose God. He meets Enoch Emery, a young man with "wise blood," who leads him to a mummified holy child and whose crazy maneuvers are a manifestation of Motes's existential struggles. This tale of redemption, retribution, false prophets, blindness, blindings, and wisdom gives us one of the most riveting characters in American fiction.
In this novel, the orphaned Francis Marion Tarwater and his cousin, the schoolteacher Rayber, defy the prophecy of their dead uncle that Tarwater will become a prophet and baptize Rayber's young son, Bishop. Tarwater fights an internal battle against his innate faith and the voices calling him to be a prophet, while Rayber tries to draw Tarwater into a more "reasonable" modern world. Both wrestle with the legacy of their dead relative and lay claim to Bishop's soul. O'Connor observes all this with an astonishing combination of irony and compassion, humor and pathos.
Flannery O'Connor and Fyodor Dostoevsky shared a deep faith in Christ, which compelled them to tell stories that forced readers to choose between eternal life and demonic possession. Their either-or extremism has not become more popular in the last fifty to a hundred years since these stories were first published. Still, it has become more relevant to a twenty-first-century culture where the lukewarm middle ground seems the most comfortable place to dwell. Giving the Devil His Due walks through all of O'Connor's stories and looks closely at Dostoevsky's magnum opus, The Brothers Karamazov, to show that when the devil rules, all hell breaks loose. Instead of this kingdom of violence, O'Connor and Dostoevsky propose a kingdom of love that is only possible when the Lord is king again.
When she died in 1964, Flannery O'Connor left behind a body of unpublished essays and lectures and several critical articles that had appeared in scattered publications during her lifetime. The brilliant pieces in Mystery and Manners, selected and edited by O'Connor's lifelong friends Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, are characterized by the boldness and simplicity of her style, a fine-tuned wit, understated perspicacity, and profound faith. These essays are gems, and their value to the contemporary reader―and writer―is priceless.
This biography depicts O’Connor’s passionate devotion to her vocation, despite her crippling illness, the rich interior life she lived through her reading and correspondence, and the development of her deep and abiding faith in the face of her impending mortality. It recounts the poignant story of America’s preeminent writer and offers the reader a guide to her novels and stories so profoundly informed by her faith.
Jonathan Rogers gets at the heart of O’Connor’s work in this biography. He follows the roots of her religion and traces the outlines of a life marked by illness and suffering but ultimately defined by irrepressible joy and even hilarity. In her stories and her life story, Flannery O’Connor extends a hand in the dark, warning and reassuring us of the terrible speed of mercy.
Flannery O’Connor Quotes
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