Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,493

This is the grave of Flannery O’Connor.

Born in 1925 in Savannah, Georgia, Mary Flannery O’Connor grew up rich in the town of Milledgeville. Her father died of lupus when she was a teenager, but they continued to live with her mother’s family there. She went to what is today Georgia State University in Atlanta, where she worked for the student newspaper, both as a writer and a cartoonist. She graduated in three years and then went to the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshops. She started to study journalism there. Sewanee Review editor Andrew Lytle became a huge supporter of her work early on. She became a rising star in American letters with lots of mentors and people were very excited to see her work. She graduated from Iowa in 1947 and stayed on another year before some other mentors basically gave her a space in Connecticut to write.

Now, in all truth, O’Connor didn’t publish that much and didn’t live that long. But her work was among the most important of the great mid-century flowering of American literature. It’s worth a detour here. Today, when people talk about “mid-century fiction,” they often default to the somewhat to extremely sexist men of the era–your Roths and your Bellows and your Updikes. Well, I get that, but that mid-century was much more than Jewish or upper class white dudes. It included great women such as Mary McCarthy or Flannery O’Connor or many others, all equally important in how we should see the era, not to mention the writers of color, men or women.

O’Connor published her first novel Wise Blood in 1952, about a World War II veteran turned militant atheist who starts an anti-church in his southern town. It didn’t really get a ton of attention right away, but that changed after John Huston directed a film version in 1979 starting himself and Brad Dourif (later Doc Cochran on Deadwood), as well as Harry Dean Stanton and Ned Beatty. Very 70s cast right there. Criterion released a definitive version of the film in 2009, but I am sorry to say I have not seen it.

Then came her collection of short stories, A Good Man in Hard to Find, from 1955. This did very well. O’Connor knew her ground and her market. She knew there was a market for stories about the South, especially at the moment when change was overtaking the region rapidly and it had an outsized role in the American imagination, and she filled that. But even though the reviews on the stories were positive, O’Connor was frequently frustrated with the lack of understanding of the South among readers and how they misinterpreted her works and those of other southern writers. As she famously said about the northern reception to southern writing, “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.” She certainly saw herself as a writer focused on realism, but it was frequently interpreted as grotesque and you can see how this would really frustrate an author. O’Connor was a Catholic in a Protestant place and a lot of her work concerns characters who are evangelicals but who go through crises of faith that bring them closer to her personal vision of Catholicism, though she avoided things such as conversion narratives, generally, because she hated writing that just laid it all out for readers (my god, imagine if she had lived long enough to have to confront the script of the average Netflix show).

O’Connor’s Catholicism was very real and very serious. She was the book reviewer for a couple of Catholic magazines during her peak time as a writer, reviewing over 100 books total in print. This included fiction of course, but also included some pretty intense theological works. On the issue of race, she was like a southern liberals but more honest about it. What I mean by that is that personally she was a huge racist and she knew that. But politically she publicly supported the civil rights movement and used some of her capital as one of the South’s most famous white writers to make that known. However, she hated to be around Black people. As she stated in a letter to the playwright Maryat Lee, “You know, I’m an integrationist by principle & a segregationist by taste. I don’t like Negros.” It’s hard to wrap my head around this, but people are complicated and the complications of the past are not the same as the complications of the present. I am sure you can find plenty of liberals who would say the same thing today about trans people, for example.

In 1952, O’Connor was diagnosed with lupus, which again, ran in her family. She was given five years to live. Mostly, she was at her home in Georgia at this point, but she still worked tremendously hard. She continued to write and review books. She managed to get out of the house for a lot of public talks too. She also spent her time raising birds, particularly exotic peafowl, but also ostriches and toucans. Must have been quite a ruckus of sound on the O’Connor farm. In fact, all the way back in 1931, a Pathé News production, the little news stories that played at the beginning of films back then, had filmed “Little Mary O’Connor” and her trained chicken. I imagine the audiences loved that. As she later said of the incident, “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.” She also sewed clothes for her pet duck as a kid and took it to school with her.

The lupus did finally take her, but after twelve years, in 1964, so we can be thankful for those last seven years. That said, she was only 39 years old when an attack of lupus after surgery for a fibroid took her.

Shortly after O’Connor’s death, her book of short stories Everything That Rises Must Converge came out to great acclaim. Her reputation only grew and when Collected Stories was released in 1971, it won the National Book Award. I don’t really think she is read as much today as she was in the 70s, but clearly she is a critically important figure in the history of American fiction.

Flannery O’Connor is buried in Memory Hill Cemetery, Milledgeville, Georgia.

If you would like this series to visit other American authors, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. In the Library of America, O’Connor’s Collected Works was Volume 39, which made her the fourth woman in the series (behind Stowe [really????], Wharton, and Cather). Most of the authors around this point I have visited. That includes Eugene O’Neill, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Abraham Lincoln, and Ulysses S. Grant. Willa Cather is in France, so I suppose that’s unrealistic. William Tecumseh Sherman’s memoirs are Volume 52 and he is in St. Louis. Then it is more people I’ve visited–Washington Irving, Francis Parkman, James Fenimore Cooper, Richard Wright, William James. Then you get to Sinclair Lewis, who is in Sauk Centre, Minnesota. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.