top|
Biography (1925–1964)
When Flannery O’Connor died of lupus before her fortieth birthday, her work was cruelly cut short. Nevertheless, she had completed two novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960), as well as thirty-one short stories. Despite her brief life and relatively modest output, her work is regarded as among the most distinguished American fiction of the mid-twentieth century. Her two collections of short stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965), were included in The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor (1971), which won the National Book Award. O’Connor’s fiction grapples with living a spiritual life in a secular world. Although this major concern is worked into each of her stories, she takes a broad approach to spiritual issues by providing moral, social, and psychological contexts that offer a wealth of insights and passion that her readers have found both startling and absorbing. Her stories are challenging because her characters, who initially seem radically different from people we know, turn out to be, by the end of each story, somehow familiar and somehow connected to us. O’Connor inhabited simultaneously two radically different worlds. The world she created in her stories is populated with bratty children, malcontents, incompetents, pious frauds, bewildered intellectuals, deformed cynics, rednecks, hucksters, racists, perverts, and murderers who experience dramatically intense moments that surprise and shock readers. Her personal life, however, was largely uneventful. She humorously acknowledged its quiet nature in 1958 when she claimed that "there won’t be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy." A broad outline of O’Connor’s life may not offer very much "exciting copy," but it does provide clues about why she wrote such powerful fiction. The only child of Catholic parents, O’Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, where she attended a parochial grammar school and high school. When she was thirteen, her father became ill with disseminated lupus, a rare, incurable blood disease, and had to abandon his real-estate business. The family moved to Milledgeville in central Georgia, where her mother’s family had lived for generations. Because there were no Catholic schools in Milledgeville, O’Connor attended a public high school. In 1942, the year after her father died of lupus, O’Connor graduated from high school and enrolled in Georgia State College for Women. There she wrote for the literary magazine until receiving her diploma in 1945. Her stories earned her a fellowship to the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, and for two years she learned to write steadily and seriously. She sold her first story to Accent in 1946 and earned her master of fine arts degree in 1947. She wrote stories about life in the rural South, and this subject matter, along with her devout Catholic perspective, became central to her fiction. With her formal education behind her, O’Connor was ready to begin her professional career at the age of twenty-two. Equipped with determination ("No one can convince me that I shouldn’t rewrite as much as I do") and offered the opportunity to be around other practicing writers, she moved to New York, where she worked on her first novel, Wise Blood. In 1950, however, she was diagnosed as having lupus, and, returning to Georgia for treatment, she took up permanent residence on her mother’s farm in Milledgeville. There she lived a severely restricted but productive life, writing stories and raising peacocks. With the exception of O’Connor’s early years in Iowa and New York and some short lecture trips to other states, she traveled little. Although she made a pilgrimage to Lourdes (apparently more for her mother’s sake than for her own) and then to Rome for an audience with the pope, her life was centered in the South. Like those of William Faulkner and many other southern writers, O’Connor’s stories evoke the rhythms of rural southern speech and manners in insulated settings where widely diverse characters mingle. Also like Faulkner, she created works whose meanings go beyond their settings. Refusing to be caricatured, she knew that "the woods are full of regional writers, and it is the great horror of every serious Southern writer that he will become one of them." O’Connor’s stories are rooted in rural southern culture, but in a larger sense they are set within the psychological and spiritual landscapes of the human soul.
|
