Life & Background
Mary Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1925 into a devoutly Catholic family in a largely Protestant region — a doubled outsider position that shaped her fiction. Her father died of lupus when she was fifteen. She studied at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and lived briefly in New York and Connecticut before being diagnosed with lupus herself at twenty-five. She returned to the family dairy farm at Andalusia, near Milledgeville, where she lived with her mother, raised peafowl, wrote for a few hours each morning, and gave occasional lectures on crutches. She published two novels and two story collections. She died in 1964 at thirty-nine. Her essays and letters, collected as Mystery and Manners and The Habit of Being, are read alongside the fiction.
A Good Man Is Hard to Find
A Georgia family sets out on holiday to Florida. The grandmother, who wanted to go to Tennessee, mentions a newspaper report about an escaped killer called The Misfit heading that way. On the road she remembers an old plantation house with a secret panel and persuades the children to badger their father into a detour, then realises the house is in Tennessee, not Georgia. The cat she has smuggled aboard springs at the driver, and the car overturns in a ditch. A car comes down the hill and three men get out; the grandmother recognises The Misfit and tells him so. The family is taken into the woods in groups and shot. Alone with him, the grandmother reaches out, calls him one of her own children, and is shot three times in the chest. He remarks that she would have been a good woman if there had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.
O'Connor described her method plainly: to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures. The violence is not gratuitous but structural — grace, in her theology, arrives at the moment a character's self-satisfaction is destroyed, and the grandmother's gesture toward The Misfit is the story's moment of grace, delivered a second before her death. She insisted that her fiction be read as a Catholic writer's, against critics who took it as regional grotesquerie. The Misfit is her most theologically serious character precisely because he takes the question of Christ's resurrection seriously enough to have organised his life around the answer.
Why O'Connor Matters
O'Connor is the central figure of Southern Gothic after Faulkner, and one of the great short story writers in English — her Complete Stories won the National Book Award posthumously. Her essays on the writer's craft and on regional fiction are widely assigned, and the argument about whether her theology is inseparable from her fiction is a standing critical question. Her handling of race, and the language of her private letters on the subject, has been re-examined critically in recent years.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- Wise Blood1952
- A Good Man Is Hard to Find1955
- The Violent Bear It Away1960
- Everything That Rises Must Converge1965
- Mystery and Manners1969
- The Habit of Being (letters)1979