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Mary Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)
 Born
on March 25, 1925, in Savannah, Georgia, Flannery O'Connor also
lived in Atlanta for a short time, moving to Milledgeville in 1941
where her father died that year of lupus erythematosus, a rare and
fatal autoimmune disease. She attended Peabody High School and then
Georgia State College for Women, graduating in 1945. Afterwards,
she studied creative writing at the University of Iowa where she
received an M.F.A. in 1947. When she started to write, she dropped
the name Mary and became known as Flannery. After completing her
studies in Iowa, Flannery lived for a short time in Saratoga Springs,
as part of an artist's colony and in New York where she met Rober
and Sally Fitzgerald who introduced her to the sophisticated New
York world of literature. She later went to live with them in Connecticut.
In 1950, she developed the same disease which killed her father
and she returned to Andalusia, the family farm in Milledgeville,
to live with her mother. Here she wrote and raised peacocks until
she died of lupus in 1964.
A
devout Catholic, Flannery O'Connor believed strongly in a spiritual
reality that was missing from the lives of those around her. Her
short stories and novels reveal her fascination with the way ordinary
people speak and with the grotesque nature of life. Her works are
filled with bizarre characters and situations which reflect her
serious beliefs on eternal matters. She believed that if one is
serious about the idea of eternity, then one can find the world
to be a rather amusing place.
Related
Links
The
Academy
Perspectives
in American Literature
The
Life of Flannery O'Connor
Flannery
O'Connor
The
Comforts of Home
Flannery
O'Connor's Childhood Home
Ina
Dillard Russell Library Special Collections
Literary
Traveler: A Good Writer is Hard to Find
Faithfulness
vs. Faith: John Huston's Version of Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood
Literature
Online: Flannery O'Connor
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