Mary Flannery O'Connor (March 25, 1925August 3, 1964) was an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. She wrote two novels and 31 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries.
O'Connor was a
Southern writer who often wrote in a sardonic
Southern Gothic style. She relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters, often in violent situations. In her writing, an unsentimental acceptance or rejection of the limitations, imperfections or differences of these characters (whether attributed to disability, race, crime, religion or sanity) typically underpins the drama.
O'Connor's writing often reflects her
Catholic
The Catholic Church (), also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the List of Christian denominations by number of members, largest Christian church, with 1.27 to 1.41 billion baptized Catholics Catholic Church by country, worldwid ...
faith, and frequently examines questions of morality and ethics. Her posthumously compiled ''Complete Stories'' won the 1972 U.S.
National Book Award for Fiction and has been the subject of enduring praise.
Early life and education
Childhood
O'Connor was born on March 25, 1925, in
Savannah, Georgia
Savannah ( ) is the oldest city in the U.S. state of Georgia (U.S. state), Georgia and the county seat of Chatham County, Georgia, Chatham County. Established in 1733 on the Savannah River, the city of Savannah became the Kingdom of Great Brita ...
, the only child of Edward Francis O'Connor, a real estate agent, and Regina Cline, both of
Irish descent. As an adult, she remembered herself as a "pigeon-toed child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I'll-bite-you complex". The
Flannery O'Connor Childhood Home museum is located at 207 E. Charlton Street on Lafayette Square.
In 1940, O'Connor and her family moved to
Milledgeville, Georgia
Milledgeville () is a city in and the county seat of Baldwin County, Georgia, Baldwin County, Georgia (U.S. state), Georgia, United States. Founded in 1803 along the Oconee River, it served as the List of current and former capital cities in the ...
, where they initially lived with her mother's family at the so-called 'Cline Mansion,' in town. In 1937, her father was diagnosed with
systemic lupus erythematosus
Lupus, formally called systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), is an autoimmune disease in which the body's immune system mistakenly attacks healthy tissue in many parts of the body. Symptoms vary among people and may be mild to severe. Common ...
, which led to his eventual death on February 1, 1941. O'Connor and her mother continued to live in Milledgeville. In 1951, they moved to Andalusia Farm, which is now a museum dedicated to O'Connor's work.
Schooling
O'Connor attended Peabody High School, where she worked as the school newspaper's art editor and from which she graduated in 1942. She entered Georgia State College for Women (now
Georgia College & State University) in an accelerated three-year program and graduated in June 1945 with a
B.A. in sociology and English literature. While at Georgia College, she produced a significant amount of cartoon work for the student newspaper. Many critics have claimed that the idiosyncratic style and approach of these early cartoons shaped her later fiction in important ways.

In 1945, she was accepted into the prestigious
Iowa Writers' Workshop
The Iowa Writers' Workshop, at the University of Iowa, is a graduate-level creative writing program. At 89 years, it is the oldest writing program offering a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in the United States. Its acceptance rate is between 2 ...
at the
University of Iowa
The University of Iowa (U of I, UIowa, or Iowa) is a public university, public research university in Iowa City, Iowa, United States. Founded in 1847, it is the oldest and largest university in the state. The University of Iowa is organized int ...
, where she went, at first, to study journalism. While there, she got to know several important writers and critics who lectured or taught in the program, among them
Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren (April 24, 1905 – September 15, 1989) was an American poet, novelist, literary critic and professor at Yale University. He was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern ...
,
John Crowe Ransom,
Robie Macauley,
Austin Warren and
Andrew Lytle. Lytle, for many years editor of the ''
Sewanee Review'', was one of the earliest admirers of her fiction. He later published several of her stories in the ''Sewanee Review'', as well as critical essays on her work. Workshop director
Paul Engle was the first to read and comment on the initial drafts of what would become ''
Wise Blood''. She received an
M.F.A. from the University of Iowa in 1947. After completing her degree, she remained at the Iowa Writers' Workshop for another year on a fellowship. During her time at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she dropped the name Mary, which gave her the impression of an "Irish washwoman", and became Flannery O'Connor.
During the summer of 1948, O'Connor continued to work on ''Wise Blood'' at
Yaddo, an artists' community in
Saratoga Springs, New York
Saratoga Springs is a Administrative divisions of New York#City, city in Saratoga County, New York, United States. The population was 28,491 at the United States Census 2020, 2020 census. The name reflects the presence of mineral springs in the ...
, where she also completed several short stories.
In 1949, O'Connor met and eventually accepted an invitation to stay with
Robert Fitzgerald (a well-known translator of the classics) and his wife, Sally, in
Ridgefield, Connecticut
Ridgefield is an affluent New England town, town in Fairfield County, Connecticut, Fairfield County, Connecticut, United States. Situated in the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains and on the New York state border, Ridgefield had a population o ...
.
Career
O'Connor is primarily known for her short stories. She published two books of short stories: ''
A Good Man Is Hard to Find'' (1955) and ''
Everything That Rises Must Converge'' (published posthumously in 1965). Many of O'Connor's short stories have been re-published in major anthologies, including ''
The Best American Short Stories'' and ''
Prize Stories''.
O'Connor's two novels are ''
Wise Blood'' (1952) (made into a
film
A film, also known as a movie or motion picture, is a work of visual art that simulates experiences and otherwise communicates ideas, stories, perceptions, emotions, or atmosphere through the use of moving images that are generally, sinc ...
by
John Huston
John Marcellus Huston ( ; August 5, 1906 – August 28, 1987) was an American film director, screenwriter and actor. He wrote the screenplays for most of the 37 feature films he directed, many of which are today considered classics. He rec ...
) and ''
The Violent Bear It Away'' (1960).
Fragments exist of an unfinished O'Connor novel tentatively entitled ''
Why Do the Heathen Rage?'' The unfinished novel draws from several of her short stories, including "
Why Do the Heathen Rage?", "
The Enduring Chill", and "
The Partridge Festival".
From 1956 through 1964, she wrote more than one hundred book reviews for two Catholic diocesan newspapers in Georgia: ''The Bulletin'' and ''The Southern Cross''. According to fellow reviewer Joey Zuber, the wide range of books she chose to review demonstrated that she was profoundly intellectual. Her reviews consistently confronted theological and ethical themes in books written by the most serious and demanding theologians of her time. Professor of English Carter Martin, an authority on O'Connor's writings, notes simply that her "book reviews are at one with her religious life".
Characteristics
Regarding her emphasis of the grotesque, O'Connor said: "
ything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case, it is going to be called realistic." Her fiction is usually set in the South and features morally flawed protagonists who frequently interact with characters with disabilities or are disabled themselves (as O'Connor was by lupus). The issue of race often appears. Most of her works feature disturbing elements, although she did not like to be characterized as cynical. "I am mighty tired of reading reviews that call ''A Good Man'' brutal and sarcastic," she wrote. "The stories are hard, but they are hard, because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism. When I see these stories described as horror stories, I am always amused, because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror."
She felt deeply informed by the sacramental and by the
Thomist notion that the created world is charged with God. For her, God was a given of experience, not a mere intuition of the mind or spirit. When
Mary McCarthy told her that she considered the
Eucharist
The Eucharist ( ; from , ), also called Holy Communion, the Blessed Sacrament or the Lord's Supper, is a Christianity, Christian Rite (Christianity), rite, considered a sacrament in most churches and an Ordinance (Christianity), ordinance in ...
only a "symbol, and a pretty good one", O'Connor completely disagreed, saying: "Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it". Yet, she did not write
apologetic fiction of the kind prevalent in the Catholic literature of the time, explaining that a writer's meaning must be evident, in his or her fiction, without
didacticism
Didacticism is a philosophy that emphasises instructional and informative qualities in literature, art, and design. In art, design, architecture, and landscape, didacticism is a conceptual approach that is driven by the urgent need to explain.
...
. She wrote ironic, subtly allegorical fiction about deceptively backward Southern characters, usually
fundamentalist Protestants, who undergo transformations of character that, to her thinking, brought them closer to the Catholic mind. The transformation is often accomplished through pain, violence, and ludicrous behavior in the pursuit of the holy. However grotesque the setting, she tried to portray her characters as open to the touch of
divine grace. This ruled out a sentimental understanding of the stories' violence, as of her own illness. She wrote: "Grace changes us, and the change is painful."
She had a deeply sardonic sense of humor, often based on the disparity between her characters' limited perceptions and the extraordinary fate awaiting them. Another frequent source of humor is the attempt of well-meaning liberals to cope with the rural South on their own terms. O'Connor used such characters' inability to come to terms with disability, race, poverty, and fundamentalism, other than in sentimental illusions, to illustrate her view that the
secular world was failing in the twentieth century.
In several stories, O'Connor explored a number of contemporary issues from the perspective of both her fundamentalist and liberal characters. She addressed
the Holocaust
The Holocaust (), known in Hebrew language, Hebrew as the (), was the genocide of History of the Jews in Europe, European Jews during World War II. From 1941 to 1945, Nazi Germany and Collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy ...
in her story "
The Displaced Person",
racial integration
Racial integration, or simply integration, includes desegregation (the process of ending systematic racial segregation), leveling barriers to association, creating equal opportunity regardless of Race (classification of human beings), race, and t ...
in "
Everything That Rises Must Converge", and
intersex
Intersex people are those born with any of several sex characteristics, including chromosome patterns, gonads, or genitals that, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, "do not fit typical binar ...
uality, in "
A Temple of the Holy Ghost". Her fiction often included references to the problem of race in the South. Occasionally, racial issues come to the forefront, as in "
The Artificial Nigger", "Everything that Rises Must Converge", and "
Judgement Day
The Last Judgment is a concept found across the Abrahamic religions and the ''Frashokereti'' of Zoroastrianism.
Christianity considers the Second Coming of Jesus, Jesus Christ to entail the final judgment by God in Abrahamic religions, God of a ...
" (her last short story, which was a drastically rewritten version of her first published story, "
The Geranium").
Despite her secluded life, her writing reveals an uncanny grasp of the nuances of human behavior. O'Connor gave many lectures on faith and literature, traveling quite far despite her frail health. Politically, she maintained a broadly progressive outlook in connection with her faith; she voted for
John F. Kennedy in 1960 and outwardly supported the work of
Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. Despite this, she made her personal stance on race and integration known throughout her life in several letters to playwright
Maryat Lee (which she wrote under the pseudonym "Mrs Turpin"). In one such letter, she said, "You know, I'm an integrationist, by principle, and a segregationist, by taste. I don't ''like'' negroes. They all give me a pain, and the more of them I see, the less and less I like them. Particularly the new kind".
According to O'Connor biographer,
Brad Gooch, there are also "letters where she even talks about a friend that she makes in graduate school at the University of Iowa who is black, and she defends this friendship to her own mother, in letters. It's complicated to look at, and I don't think that we can box her in".
Letters
Throughout her life, O'Connor maintained a wide correspondence with writers that included
Robert Lowell and
Elizabeth Bishop, English professor
Samuel Ashley Brown, Catholic nun and literary critic
M. Bernetta Quinn, and playwright
Maryat Lee. After her death, a selection of her letters, edited by her friend Sally Fitzgerald, was published as ''The Habit of Being''. Much of O'Connor's best-known writing on religion, writing, and the South is contained in these and other letters.
In 1955,
Betty Hester, an Atlanta file clerk, wrote O'Connor a letter, expressing admiration for her work. Hester's letter drew O'Connor's attention, and they corresponded frequently. For ''The Habit of Being'', Hester provided Fitzgerald with all the letters she received from O'Connor but requested that her identity be kept private. She was identified only as "A." The complete collection of the unedited letters between O'Connor and Hester was unveiled by
Emory University
Emory University is a private university, private research university in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. It was founded in 1836 as Emory College by the Methodist Episcopal Church and named in honor of Methodist bishop John Emory. Its main campu ...
in May 2007. The letters had been given to the university in 1987 with the stipulation that they not be released to the public for 20 years.
Emory University also contains the more than 600 letters O'Connor wrote to her mother, Regina. O'Connor wrote to her mother nearly every day while she was pursuing her literary career in Iowa City, New York, and Massachusetts. Some of her letters describe "travel itineraries and plumbing mishaps, ripped stockings and roommates with loud radios," as well as her request for the homemade mayonnaise of her childhood.
Visual arts
O'Connor was an avid cartoonist and painter, "I don't know how to write," she once said. "But I can draw." In 2023, two barrels full of paintings on wood tile by O'Connor were discovered, hidden it was thought by her trustees who were worried it would distract from her fame as a writer.
Personal life
Catholicism
O'Connor was a devout Catholic. A prayer journal O'Connor had kept during her time at the University of Iowa was published in 2013. It included prayers and ruminations on faith, writing, and O'Connor's relationship with God. O'Connor was an avid reader of
Christian existentialist philosophers such as
Gabriel Marcel, considering herself "a Catholic peculiarly possessed of the modern consciousness", and thinking that the South was "Christ-haunted".
Interest in birds
O'Connor frequently used bird imagery within her fiction.
O'Connor kept
chickens and
canaries at her childhood home in Savannah. When she was six, O'Connor experienced her first brush with celebrity status.
Pathé News filmed "Little Mary O'Connor" with O'Connor and her trained
chicken
The chicken (''Gallus gallus domesticus'') is a domesticated subspecies of the red junglefowl (''Gallus gallus''), originally native to Southeast Asia. It was first domesticated around 8,000 years ago and is now one of the most common and w ...
and showed the film around the country. She said: "When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathé News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been an anticlimax." According to writer and critic Catherine Taylor, the "determined chicken, walking backwards to go forward, is a tempting metaphor for O'Connor's own endurance. It instilled in her a 'love affair' with birds that seemed to transcend most human interactions".
In high school, when the girls were required to sew Sunday dresses for themselves, O'Connor sewed a full outfit of underwear and clothes to fit her pet duck and brought the duck to school to model it.
As an adult at Andalusia, she raised and nurtured some 100
peafowl
Peafowl is a common name for two bird species of the genus '' Pavo'' and one species of the closely related genus '' Afropavo'' within the tribe Pavonini of the family Phasianidae (the pheasants and their allies). Male peafowl are referred t ...
. Fascinated by birds of all kinds, she raised ducks, ostriches, emus, toucans, and any sort of exotic bird she could obtain, while incorporating peacock imagery in her writing. She described her peacocks in an essay titled "The King of the Birds". O'Connor often used peacocks as symbolism in her writing. The birds are thought to represent divine beauty and mystery, connecting to her spirituality and belief in living reminders of the unexpected, mysterious ways grace appears in the world.
Illness and death
By the summer of 1952, O'Connor was diagnosed with
systemic lupus erythematosus
Lupus, formally called systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), is an autoimmune disease in which the body's immune system mistakenly attacks healthy tissue in many parts of the body. Symptoms vary among people and may be mild to severe. Common ...
(lupus), as her father had been before her. She remained at
Andalusia
Andalusia ( , ; , ) is the southernmost autonomous communities of Spain, autonomous community in Peninsular Spain, located in the south of the Iberian Peninsula, in southwestern Europe. It is the most populous and the second-largest autonomou ...
for the rest of her life. O'Connor lived for twelve years after her diagnosis, which was seven years longer than expected. Her daily routine was to attend Mass, write in the morning, then, spend the rest of the day recuperating and reading. Despite the debilitating effects of the steroid drugs used to treat O'Connor's lupus, she nonetheless made over sixty appearances at lectures to read her works. In the PBS documentary ''
Flannery'', the writer
Alice McDermott explains the impact lupus had on O'Connor's work, saying, "It was the illness, I think, which made her the writer she is".
O'Connor completed more than two dozen short stories and two novels while living with lupus. "The wolf, I'm afraid, is inside tearing up the place", she wrote to her friend Sister
Mariella Gable just a few weeks before her death. She died on August 3, 1964 at the age of 39 in Baldwin County Hospital. Her death was caused by complications from a new attack of lupus, following surgery for a
uterine fibroid. She is buried in Milledgeville, Georgia, at
Memory Hill Cemetery.
Legacy, awards, and tributes
O'Connor's ''Complete Stories'' won the 1972 U.S.
National Book Award for Fiction and, in a 2009 online poll, was named the best book ever to have won the National Book Awards.
In June 2015, the
United States Postal Service
The United States Postal Service (USPS), also known as the Post Office, U.S. Mail, or simply the Postal Service, is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the executive branch of the federal governmen ...
honored O'Connor with a new postage stamp, the 30th issuance in the Literary Arts series. Some criticized the stamp as failing to reflect O'Connor's character and legacy.
The
Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, named in honor of O'Connor by the
University of Georgia Press
The University of Georgia Press or UGA Press is the university press of the University of Georgia, a public land-grant research university with its main campus in Athens, Georgia. It is the oldest and largest publishing house in Georgia and a me ...
, is a prize given annually since 1983 to an outstanding collection of short stories.
The Flannery O'Connor Book Trail is a series of
Little Free Libraries stretching between O'Connor's homes in Savannah and Milledgeville.
The
Flannery O'Connor Childhood Home is a historic house museum in Savannah, Georgia, where O'Connor lived during her childhood. In addition to serving as a museum, the house hosts regular events and programs.
Loyola University Maryland
Loyola University Maryland is a Private university, private Society of Jesus, Jesuit university in Baltimore, Maryland. Established as Loyola College in Maryland by John Early (educator), John Early and eight other members of the Society of Je ...
had a student dormitory named for O'Connor. In 2020, Flannery O'Connor Hall was renamed in honor of activist Sister
Thea Bowman. The announcement also mentions, "This renaming comes after recent recognition of Flannery O'Connor, a 20th century Catholic American writer, and the racism present in some of her work."
The ''Flannery List'', named after O'Connor is a curated list of musicals and plays that ""deal in an interesting way with faith, religion, and/or spirituality."
The film, ''Flannery: The Storied Life of the Writer from Georgia'' has been described as the story of a writer "who wrestled with the greater mysteries of existence."
In 2023, the biographical film ''
Wildcat'' was released. Co-written and directed by
Ethan Hawke
Ethan Green Hawke (born November 6, 1970) is an American actor, author, and film director. He made his film debut in ''Explorers (film), Explorers'' (1985), before making a breakthrough performance in ''Dead Poets Society'' (1989). Hawke starr ...
and starring his daughter as Flannery O'Connor, the film features a dramatization of O'Connor trying to publish ''Wise Blood,'' interspersed with scenes from her short fiction.
But it's a film that O'Connor scholar Bruce Gentry says, "has five hundred factual errors."
In May 2023, about two dozen small paintings O'Connor had done in her youth were found in the attic of the 200-year-old Milledgeville mansion where she had lived between the ages of eight and twenty-one. In March 2025 they were displayed at
Georgia College & State University.
In 2024, O'Connor's unfinished novel ''Why Do the Heathen Rage?'' was published by Brazos Press. Jessica Hooten Wilson assembled scenes from O'Connor's drafts and supplied her own critical commentary.
Works
Novels
* ''
Wise Blood'' (1952)
* ''
The Violent Bear It Away'' (1960)
* ''Why Do The Heathen Rage'' (unfinished; published 2024)
Short story collections
* ''
A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories'' (1955)
* ''
Everything That Rises Must Converge'' (1965)
* ''
The Complete Stories'' (1971)
Other works
* ''Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose'' (1969)
* ''The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor'' (1979)
* ''The Presence of Grace: and Other Book Reviews'' (1983)
* ''Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works'' (1988)
* ''Flannery O'Connor: The Cartoons'' (2012)
* ''A Prayer Journal'' (2013)
See also
*
Southern United States literature
References
Citations
Works cited
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Further reading
General
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Biographies
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Criticism and cultural impact
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Scholarly guides
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External links
The Flannery O'Connor Repository*
* Flannery O'Connor reads short stor
A Good Man is Hard to Find(audio)
* Flannery O'Connor introduction to lecture, o
Southern Grotesque
* Flannery O'Conno
cartoons
Library resources
''Postmarked Milledgeville'' a guide to archival collections of O'Connor's letters
Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library Emory University
Flannery O'Connor papers, 1832–2003Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library Emory University
Flannery O'Connor collection, c. 1937–2003Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library Emory University
Letters to Betty Hester, 1955–1964
{{DEFAULTSORT:OConnor, Flannery
1925 births
1964 deaths
20th-century American essayists
20th-century American novelists
20th-century American short story writers
20th-century American women writers
20th-century Roman Catholics
American feminists
American people of Irish descent
American Roman Catholic writers
American women environmentalists
American women essayists
American women novelists
American women religious writers
American women short story writers
American writers of Irish descent
American writers with disabilities
Burials at Memory Hill Cemetery
Catholic feminists
Catholics from Connecticut
Catholics from Georgia (U.S. state)
Christian novelists
Deaths from lupus
Ecofeminists
Georgia College & State University alumni
Iowa Writers' Workshop alumni
National Book Award winners
Novelists from Georgia (U.S. state)
O. Henry Award winners
People from Milledgeville, Georgia
People with lupus
University of Iowa alumni
Virtue ethicists
Writers from Ridgefield, Connecticut
Writers from Savannah, Georgia
Writers of American Southern literature
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Yaddo alumni