Flannery O'Connor Introduction
What Flannery O'Connor did... and why you should care
Though her total literary output consists of just two novels and several dozen short stories, Flannery O'Connor remains one of the most compelling figures in American literature.
O'Connor was born in 1925 in Savannah, Georgia, and died thirty-nine years later in nearby Milledgeville. She helped define the genre known as Southern Gothic, a style rooted firmly in the American South that emphasizes the grotesque, the horrifying, and the just-plain-wrong.
Like that one time you saw your eighty-year-old great-uncle Milton in a mankini.
O'Connor found a way to tap into life's horrors and make them impossible to look away from. As poet T.S. Eliot once said of her work, "she has certainly an uncanny talent of a high order but my nerves are just not strong enough to take much of a disturbance,"1
Wonder how his nerves would've fared after an eye-full of mankini-Milton...
O'Connor's voice was prematurely silenced in 1964, after succumbing to a twelve-year battle with lupus. Her illness kept her confined to a farm in rural Georgia for the last third of her life, and she died at the age of thirty-nine, just one year after Esquire magazine listed her in the "red hot center" of the new literary elite.2
Geez, Esquire...way to jinx it...
Even with that endorsement under her belt, Flannery remained humble. "There won't be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy."3
We guess she never saw the 2000 animated classic, Chicken Run.