Flannery O’Connor
Born: March 25, 1925
Died: August 3, 1964
A cradle Catholic, Flannery O’Connor dwelled in the depths of the Protestant South for most of her life, living with her mother on her family’s dairy farm in Milledgeville, Georgia. There she wrote her most memorable stories and raised peacocks because the “king of the birds” fascinated her.
She attended Mass daily at Sacred Heart Church in town and traveled to universities to lecture as her fame grew. Her mobility was limited when she was diagnosed with lupus in 1950 at age 25. It was the same disease that killed her father a month before her 16th birthday.
The affliction hardly limited her writing and provided no basis for self-pity. An extensive collection of published personal letters she wrote to friends and literary correspondents reveals what she really cared about—her work—and minimizes her disease with a comical, self-effacing manner.
Working furiously from her deathbed, she completed Everything That Rises Must Converge, a collection of short stories many critics consider her finest work. “I have drug another out of myself and I enclose it,” she wrote a friend on July 15, 1964. Just two weeks later, at 39, Flannery O’Connor died.
More about Flannery O’Connor:
Flannery O’Connor: Finding God in human messiness
Unashamedly Catholic, O’Connor found the messy circumstances of human life not void of God’s presence, but the very place where grace often enters.
Flannery O’Connor, companion in exile
Encounters with humility and grace on a journey to the writer's Georgia home.
Image: Wikimedia Commons/Charles Cameron Macauley [CC BY-SA 4.0]
