Mary Flannery O’Connor (1925–64) was an American novelist and short-story writer distinguished for her dark humor. Her writing blended irony, grotesquerie, violence, and traditional belief with an overpowering moral and theological vision of redemption, sin, and guilt in the American South.
Born in Savannah, Georgia, O’Connor spent much of her life on her family’s farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, raising poultry and writing novels and short stories. She is best known for her Gothic novels Wise Blood (1952,) about a young religious fanatic who tries to institute a “Church Without Christ” in the Georgia mountains, and The Violent Bear It Away (1960,) a gruesome tale set in the backwaters of Georgia and presenting the obsessive mission of a boy determined to baptize an even younger boy.
O’Connor’s stories, set also in the South, and also grotesque, are collected in A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955,) Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965,) and Complete Stories (1971.) She also wrote prose in Mystery and Manners (1969) and The Habit of Being (1979,) and book reviews as The Presence of Grace (1983.)
O’Connor’s novels and short stories dramatize the difficulty and the necessity of spiritual faith and redemption in a world increasingly empty of meaning and transcendence. The depth of her spiritual vision evokes American writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, and her influential mastery over the short-story form calls to mind Edgar Allan Poe and Ernest Hemingway.
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There was a time when the average reader read a novel simply for the moral he could get out of it, and however naive that may have been, it was a good deal less naive than some of the limited objectives he has now. Today novels are considered to be entirely concerned with the social or economic or psychological forces that they will by necessity exhibit, or with those details of daily life that are for the good novelist only means to some deeper end.
—Flannery O’Connor
Topics: Books, Literature
Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
—Flannery O’Connor
Topics: Writers, Authors & Writing, Writing, Teaching
Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers.
—Flannery O’Connor
Topics: Manners
The basic experience of everyone is the experience of human limitation.
—Flannery O’Connor
Topics: Experience
To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life, and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.
—Flannery O’Connor
Topics: Realistic Expectations
I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best.
—Flannery O’Connor
Topics: Excellence
If you do the same thing every day at the same time for the same length of time, you’ll save yourself from many a sink. Routine is a condition of survival.
—Flannery O’Connor
It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.
—Flannery O’Connor
Topics: Authors & Writing, Fiction