36 Facts About Flannery O'Connor

Mary Flannery O'Connor was an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist.

Flannery O'Connor wrote two novels and 31 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries.

Flannery O'Connor relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters, often in violent situations.

Flannery O'Connor's writing often reflects her Catholic faith, and frequently examines questions of morality and ethics.

Flannery O'Connor's posthumously compiled Complete Stories won the 1972 US National Book Award for Fiction and has been the subject of enduring praise.

Flannery O'Connor was born on March 25,1925, in Savannah, Georgia, the only child of Edward Francis Flannery O'Connor, a real estate agent, and Regina Cline, both of Irish descent.

Flannery O'Connor attended Peabody High School, where she worked as the school newspaper's art editor and from which she graduated in 1942.

Flannery O'Connor later published several of her stories in the Sewanee Review, as well as critical essays on her work.

In 1949, Flannery O'Connor met and eventually accepted an invitation to stay with Robert Fitzgerald and his wife, Sally, in Ridgefield, Connecticut.

Flannery O'Connor published two books of short stories: A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge.

Flannery O'Connor felt deeply informed by the sacramental and by the Thomist notion that the created world is charged with God.

When Mary McCarthy told her that she considered the Eucharist only a "symbol, and a pretty good one", Flannery O'Connor completely disagreed, saying: "Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it".

Flannery O'Connor wrote ironic, subtly allegorical fiction about deceptively backward Southern characters, usually fundamentalist Protestants, who undergo transformations of character that, to her thinking, brought them closer to the Catholic mind.

Flannery O'Connor had a deeply sardonic sense of humor, often based on the disparity between her characters' limited perceptions and the extraordinary fate awaiting them.

Flannery O'Connor used such characters' inability to come to terms with disability, race, poverty, and fundamentalism, other than in sentimental illusions, to illustrate her view that the secular world was failing in the twentieth century.

In several stories, Flannery O'Connor explored a number of contemporary issues from the perspective of both her fundamentalist and liberal characters.

Flannery O'Connor gave many lectures on faith and literature, traveling quite far despite her frail health.

Much of Flannery O'Connor's best-known writing on religion, writing, and the South is contained in these and other letters.

Emory University contains the more than 600 letters Flannery O'Connor wrote to her mother, Regina.

Flannery O'Connor wrote to her mother nearly every day while she was pursuing her literary career in Iowa City, New York, and Massachusetts.

Flannery O'Connor was an avid cartoonist and painter, "I don't know how to write," she once said.

Flannery O'Connor was an avid reader of Christian existentialist philosophers such as Gabriel Marcel, considering herself "a Catholic peculiarly possessed of the modern consciousness", and thinking that the South was "Christ-haunted".

Flannery O'Connor kept chickens and canaries at her childhood home in Savannah.

When she was six, Flannery O'Connor experienced her first brush with celebrity status.

In high school, when the girls were required to sew Sunday dresses for themselves, Flannery O'Connor sewed a full outfit of underwear and clothes to fit her pet duck and brought the duck to school to model it.

Flannery O'Connor described her peacocks in an essay titled "The King of the Birds".

Flannery O'Connor remained at Andalusia for the rest of her life.

Flannery O'Connor lived for twelve years after her diagnosis, which was seven years longer than expected.

Flannery O'Connor completed more than two dozen short stories and two novels while living with lupus.

Flannery O'Connor died on August 3,1964 at the age of 39 in Baldwin County Hospital.

Flannery O'Connor's death was caused by complications from a new attack of lupus, following surgery for a uterine fibroid.

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

The Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, named in honor of O'Connor by the University of Georgia Press, is a prize given annually since 1983 to an outstanding collection of short stories.

The Flannery O'Connor Book Trail is a series of Little Free Libraries stretching between O'Connor's homes in Savannah and Milledgeville.

The Flannery O'Connor Childhood Home is a historic house museum in Savannah, Georgia, where O'Connor lived during her childhood.

In 2020, Flannery O'Connor Hall was renamed in honor of activist Sister Thea Bowman.