36 Facts About Flannery O'Connor

1.

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

2.

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

3.

Flannery O'Connor was a Southern writer who often wrote in a sardonic Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters, often in violent situations.

4.

Flannery O'Connor's writing reflected her Roman Catholic faith and frequently examined questions of Catholicism-defined morality and ethics.

5.

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.

6.

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

7.

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

8.

Flannery O'Connor remained at the Iowa Writers' Workshop for another year after completing her degree on a fellowship.

9.

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

10.

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

11.

Flannery O'Connor has had several books of her other writings published, and her enduring influence is attested by a growing body of scholarly studies of her work.

12.

Flannery O'Connor's writing career can be divided into four five-year periods of increasing skill and ambition, 1945 to 1964:.

13.

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

14.

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.

15.

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

16.

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.

17.

In several stories, Flannery O'Connor explored some of the most sensitive contemporary issues that her liberal and fundamentalist characters might encounter.

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

Emory University contains the more than 600 letters Flannery O'Connor wrote to her mother, Regina, nearly every day while she was pursuing her literary career in Iowa City, New York, and Massachusetts.

27.

Flannery O'Connor lived with her mother for 34 of her 39 years of life.

28.

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

29.

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.

30.

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

31.

Flannery O'Connor was inducted into the Savannah Women of Vision investiture in 2016.

32.

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.

33.

Flannery O'Connor's name is mentioned many times in this song, it can be found on the 1989 album 12 Point Buck.

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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