Flannery O’Connor’s fiction often is labeled as “Southern Gothic” or “Southern Grotesque.” In response to this, O’Connor once said that “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.”

I grew up reading the stories of Flannery O’Connor, but I’m not sure that high school students these days ever study her work.   A friend of mine is currently taking a graduate class at Georgia College & State University on O’Connor’s work, and while I enjoy O’Connor’s dark sense of humor, I believe my friend is a braver woman than I am to attempt such a class!

O’Connor was born in Savannah, GA on March 25, 1925, and the family moved to Milledgeville, GA in 1938.  O’Connor attended Peabody High School, and later Georgia State College for Women (now GCSU) in Milledgeville.  In 1945 O’Connor received a scholarship in journalism from the State University of Iowa (now the University of Iowa).  After completing her M.F.A. in 1947, O’Connor won the Rinehart-Iowa Fiction Award and was accepted at Yaddo, an artists’ retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York. At Yaddo, she worked on her novel Wise Blood and became friends with the poet Robert Lowell.  After leaving Yaddo in 1949, O’Connor lived briefly in New York City and Connecticut.  In 1950, however, O’Connor was stricken with lupus and was forced to return to Milledgeville permanently. Remaining there from 1951 until 1964, O’Connor lived at Andalusia, the family farm, where she managed to continue to write despite her illness.  On August 3, 1964, however, after several days in a coma, she died from complications of lupus following surgery.  She is buried beside her father in Memory Hill Cemetery in Milledgeville.

In 1972, O’Connor was posthumously awarded the National Book Award for her collection The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor.

For more information on O’Connor:

• The Flannery O’Connor Collection at Georgia College & State University
• The Flannery O’Connor – Andalusia Foundation
• EDSITEment, a teacher-oriented site, includes lesson plan ideas (as well as a fascinating link to Georgia religious highway signs from the 1940s)
• Article in the New Georgia Encyclopedia
• Search DCPL’s catalog for titles by O’Connor (try an author list search for “O’Connor, Flannery”) or books about O’Connor and her work (subject list search for her name)

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