Lily Davis
11/10/14
Period 3
Flannery O’Connor Essay Mary Flannery O’Connor is one of the most recognized short story writers of all time. . Flannery excelled in school and graduated from the University of Iowa; O'Connor's body of work was small, consisting of only thirty-one stories, two novels, and some speeches and letters. Flannery. She belonged to the Southern Gothic tradition that focused on the decaying South and its people. She died young of lupus similar to her father.
Flannery O’Connor, born on March 25, 1925, in Savannah, Georgia. She was born into the marriage of Georgia’s two oldest Catholic families as an only child and continued her life as a believer in the Catholic religion. She began her education in parochial schools then after her family moved to Milledgeville, Georgia in 1938, she went to school at the Peabody Laboratory School. At the age of 15, her father, Edward F. O'Connor, died of systemic lupus erythematosus, the same disease she would eventually die of. In 1945, O'Connor received a scholarship from the State University of Iowa in journalism. The Georgia Encyclopedia states, “In her first term, she decided that journalism was not her metier and sought out Paul Engle, head of the now world-famous Writers' Workshop, to ask if she might enter the master's program in creative writing.” Engle agreed. Flannery’s master these was The Geranium, a collection of short stories, and in the following year received her Master’s degree in Fine Arts and Literature.
O’Connor is famous for her writings of short stories during the 20th century. Her first novel was Wise Blood, people were at a loss of words for this dark work and it received mixed reviews. After her first short-story collection comes out, A Good Man is Hard to Find, the readers begin understanding her writing style. “O'Connor's short stories have not so strong theological basis as her novels. They often focus on grotesque characters, have a crisp humor, and are open to interpretation.” Many questioned if her writings were Christian because of the murders and darkness of all her pieces. O’Connor says herself, “I read a lot of theology because it makes my writing bolder.” She is also known as the nation’s only good Christian writer, Professor Ralph Wood states, “Flannery O’Connor is the only great Christian writer this nation has produced… She is a Southerner and a Catholic, she’s not at the center of American culture, and yet she is our only great Christian writer.”
Brad Gooch writes, “O’Connor developed a high fever on a train ride home to Georgia at Christmastime 1950. She was diagnosed, like her father, with lupus erythematosus, and over the next year was in and out of hospitals in Milledgeville and at Emory University in Atlanta.” She lived on a dairy farm with her mother to get better where she lived in a room downstairs, she was too weak to climb stairs, and continued her work. Rafael Pi Roman says in an interview of O’Connor’s life towards the end, “In her room after church she would write all morning, facing