O’Connor, Flannery
Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) stunned readers with her morally driven stories peopled with grotesque characters. Even while stricken with lupus, she wrote every day, producing a body of work that included two novels and more than thirty short stories. She was also an avid book reviewer, penning more than 100 reviews for various publications.
Although she lived a somewhat sheltered life, O’Connor’s work depicted subtleties of human behavior with razor precision. Her dark humor wasn’t appreciated by all — its religious overtones (she was a devout Catholic) were highly provocative. Today, her work is still much discussed because of its detail, symbolism and imagery. Her work is categorized as “Southern Gothic,” and relies heavily on regional themes. O’Connor famously said: “Anything 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.”
Major works
- A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories
- The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor
- Everything that Rises Must Converge
- Wise Blood
- The Violent Bear It Away
Autobiographies and Biographies about Flannery O’Connor
- The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor
- Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor by Brad Gooch
- Flannery O’Connor: A Life by Jean W. Cash
More Information
Visit Flannery O’Connor’s childhood home and other locations
- Andalusia - Milledgeville, GA
- Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home - Savannah, GA
- Flannery O’ Connor Room -Georgia College and State University, Milledgeville, GA
Flannery O’Connor Quotes
“Everywhere I go, I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”
“I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.”
“The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.”
“A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.”
“I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.”
