Flannery O'Connor

Based on Wikipedia: Flannery O'Connor

The Chicken That Changed Everything

When Flannery O'Connor was six years old, she taught a chicken to walk backwards. Pathé News showed up to film it, and little Mary O'Connor became a minor celebrity across America. Decades later, she would reflect on this moment with characteristic dark humor: "I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been an anticlimax."

She was joking, of course. Mostly.

The woman who would become one of America's most distinctive literary voices spent her short life creating fiction so unsettling, so violent, and so unexpectedly funny that readers still argue about what she actually meant. Her characters include serial killers who philosophize about grace, con men missing legs, and intellectuals who get gored by bulls. The violence in her stories is sudden and often absurd. The humor is pitch-black. And underneath it all runs a current of religious conviction so deep that many secular readers miss it entirely.

A Southern Gothic Life

Mary Flannery O'Connor was born on March 25, 1925, in Savannah, Georgia. She was an only child, and by her own account, not a particularly pleasant one. She described her younger self as "a pigeon-toed child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I'll-bite-you complex."

Both her parents were of Irish Catholic descent, which made her something of an anomaly in the Protestant South. Her father, Edward, worked in real estate. In 1937, when Flannery was twelve, he was diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus, an autoimmune disease in which the body's immune system attacks its own tissues. He died four years later. This diagnosis would prove grimly prophetic.

The family had moved to Milledgeville, Georgia, in 1940, initially living with Regina Cline O'Connor's family in what locals called the Cline Mansion. After Edward's death, Flannery and her mother stayed on in Milledgeville. In 1951, they would move to Andalusia Farm, where Flannery would spend the rest of her life.

But that's getting ahead of the story.

The Cartoonist Who Became a Writer

At Peabody High School, O'Connor served as art editor for the school newspaper. She had a genuine talent for drawing, and her early ambition leaned toward visual art. When she enrolled at Georgia State College for Women in an accelerated three-year program, she continued producing cartoon work for the student newspaper. These cartoons weren't throwaway doodles. Critics have argued that their idiosyncratic style, which combined sharp observation with a slightly grotesque sensibility, shaped the fiction she would later write.

After graduating in 1945 with a degree in sociology and English literature, O'Connor was accepted into the Iowa Writers' Workshop, one of the most prestigious creative writing programs in the country. She initially enrolled to study journalism. That didn't last.

At Iowa, she encountered a constellation of influential literary figures. Robert Penn Warren. John Crowe Ransom. Andrew Lytle, who would become one of her earliest champions and later publish her stories in the Sewanee Review. The workshop director, Paul Engle, was the first person to read drafts of what would become her debut novel, Wise Blood.

It was also at Iowa that Mary Flannery became simply Flannery. She dropped her first name because it gave her, she said, the impression of "an Irish washwoman." She earned her Master of Fine Arts degree in 1947, stayed on for another year on a fellowship, and spent the summer of 1948 at Yaddo, the famous artists' colony in upstate New York, continuing to work on her novel.

The Wolf Inside

In 1950, while staying with friends in Connecticut, O'Connor became seriously ill. The diagnosis came in 1952: systemic lupus erythematosus. The same disease that had killed her father.

She was twenty-seven years old.

At the time, lupus patients typically survived only about five years after diagnosis. O'Connor lived for twelve, which suggests either remarkable medical management, sheer stubbornness, or both. She returned to Andalusia Farm, and there she stayed.

Her daily routine became almost monastic. Mass in the morning. Writing until noon. The rest of the day devoted to recuperation and reading. The steroid drugs used to treat her lupus had debilitating side effects, but she kept working. She completed more than two dozen short stories and two novels while living with the disease.

The writer Alice McDermott has suggested that the illness actually shaped O'Connor's literary sensibility. Living constantly with mortality sharpened her vision. There's no sentimentality in her fiction because she had no time for it.

In a letter to a friend shortly before her death, O'Connor wrote: "The wolf, I'm afraid, is inside tearing up the place."

The Grotesque as Method

O'Connor is usually classified as a Southern Gothic writer, which is accurate but incomplete. Her fiction is set in rural Georgia, populated by characters who seem almost like caricatures until you realize they're not. They're exaggerated, yes, but the exaggeration reveals rather than distorts.

She relied heavily on what critics call the grotesque. Her characters frequently have disabilities or deformities. Violence erupts without warning. People die in ways that seem almost random. When reviewers called her work "brutal" and "sarcastic," she pushed back. "The stories are hard," she admitted, "but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism."

This is where many readers get confused. O'Connor was a devout Catholic writing fiction filled with murder, meanness, and people who seem utterly unredeemed. Her characters are often fundamentalist Protestants, not Catholics. Where's the faith in all this darkness?

For O'Connor, the answer was grace. Divine grace, in her understanding, doesn't arrive gently. It crashes into people's lives and forces transformation through pain. "All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it," she explained. "But most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless, brutal."

She found this misreading amusing and frustrating in equal measure. "When I see these stories described as horror stories," she wrote, "I am always amused, because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror."

The Eucharist and the Secular World

One of the most famous anecdotes about O'Connor involves a dinner party with the writer Mary McCarthy. McCarthy, who had been raised Catholic but lost her faith, remarked that she thought of the Eucharist as a symbol, and "a pretty good one."

O'Connor's response was blunt: "Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it."

For O'Connor, Catholic doctrine wasn't metaphor. The bread and wine at communion actually became the body and blood of Christ. God wasn't an idea to be contemplated but a reality to be encountered. She was deeply influenced by Thomas Aquinas, the medieval philosopher who argued that the created world is charged with divine presence. For her, God was a given of experience, not a mere intuition.

Yet she didn't write apologetic fiction. She wasn't trying to convert her readers or illustrate catechism lessons. Her characters undergo transformations, but the transformations happen through violence, through failure, through the collapse of their illusions. If they move closer to what O'Connor understood as truth, they do so kicking and screaming.

"Grace changes us," she wrote, "and the change is painful."

The Humor in Darkness

What sometimes gets lost in discussions of O'Connor's violence and religious vision is how funny she was. Her humor was sardonic, often turning on the gap between how her characters see themselves and what they actually are.

She had particular fun with what she called "well-meaning liberals" who tried to understand the rural South on their own terms. These educated, progressive characters appear throughout her fiction, confident in their enlightened views, completely unable to cope with the reality in front of them. Their sentimentality becomes a kind of blindness.

This wasn't entirely fair to liberals, perhaps. But O'Connor wasn't writing sociology. She was creating a fictional world where everyone's illusions get stripped away, where no one escapes judgment. The intellectuals just happen to be especially satisfying targets because they're so sure they've already figured everything out.

Race, Integration, and Contradiction

O'Connor's fiction frequently addresses race. Stories like "The Artificial Nigger" (the title alone marks how differently language was used in her era), "Everything That Rises Must Converge," and "Judgement Day" put racial tension at their center. She voted for John F. Kennedy in 1960 and expressed support for Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement.

But her private letters tell a more complicated story. In correspondence with the playwright Maryat Lee, O'Connor wrote things that modern readers find shocking. "I'm an integrationist by principle and a segregationist by taste," she admitted in one letter. "I don't like negroes."

How do we reconcile this with her public positions and with the moral seriousness of her fiction? Her biographer Brad Gooch notes that other letters show her defending a friendship with a Black fellow student at Iowa against her own mother's objections. "It's complicated to look at," Gooch says, "and I don't think that we can box her in."

This is uncomfortable, but important. Great writers are not always good people, and good people are rarely consistent. O'Connor's fiction examines human limitation and moral failure with devastating precision. That she was herself limited and morally inconsistent shouldn't surprise us. It might even explain where her insight came from.

A Hundred Peacocks

Back to the birds.

That backward-walking chicken was only the beginning. O'Connor maintained a lifelong fascination with birds that, as one critic put it, "seemed to transcend most human interactions." At Andalusia, she raised about a hundred peafowl, along with ducks, ostriches, emus, toucans, and whatever other exotic birds she could obtain.

Peacocks appear throughout her writing, and she devoted an essay to them called "The King of the Birds." For O'Connor, they represented divine beauty and mystery. The peacock's extravagant display, so impractical and so glorious, embodied the unexpected ways grace appears in the world.

There's something deeply characteristic about O'Connor spending her final years on a Georgia farm, too ill to travel much, surrounded by screaming peacocks and writing some of the most disturbing fiction in American literature. The peacocks were absurd. So was grace. So was the whole situation.

The Work That Remains

O'Connor published two novels during her lifetime. Wise Blood appeared in 1952, the same year she was diagnosed with lupus. John Huston later adapted it into a film. The Violent Bear It Away followed in 1960. She was working on a third novel when she died, drawing material from several of her short stories, but she never finished it.

Her short fiction is what she's most remembered for. Two collections appeared: A Good Man Is Hard to Find in 1955, and Everything That Rises Must Converge posthumously in 1965. The Complete Stories, published in 1972, won the National Book Award for Fiction. In 2009, an online poll named it the best book ever to have won that award.

She also wrote more than a hundred book reviews for Catholic diocesan newspapers, and her letters, collected in The Habit of Being, reveal a brilliant correspondent who thought deeply about faith, writing, and what it meant to be a Southerner in the twentieth century.

The End

Flannery O'Connor died on August 3, 1964, at Baldwin County Hospital. She was thirty-nine years old. The immediate cause was complications from a new lupus attack, triggered by surgery for a uterine fibroid. She's buried in Milledgeville, at Memory Hill Cemetery.

In 2015, the United States Postal Service issued a stamp in her honor, part of its Literary Arts series. Some critics complained that the stamp failed to capture her character. It's hard to imagine what would. How do you fit violence, grace, peacocks, and a backward-walking chicken onto a postage stamp?

Maybe you don't try. Maybe you just read the stories.

Why She Still Matters

O'Connor wrote from a position most contemporary readers don't share. She believed in a literal God, a literal devil, and a literal hell. She thought the Eucharist was actually the body of Christ. She lived in the rural South among people whose worldview many educated readers find incomprehensible.

And yet her fiction continues to unsettle and fascinate readers who share none of her convictions. Partly this is because she was simply a great prose stylist, with an ear for dialogue and a gift for the striking image. But it's also because she wrote about something real: the gap between who we think we are and what we actually are. The way comfortable illusions shatter. The terrifying possibility that there might be something we're accountable to beyond ourselves.

You don't have to believe in grace to recognize the moment when a character's self-image collapses. You don't have to be Catholic to feel the weight of judgment in her stories. O'Connor once said that a story is a way of saying something that cannot be said any other way. Whatever she was trying to say, it still can't be said any other way.

The chicken walked backward to go forward. Everything since has been an anticlimax.