Flannery o'connor 1925-1964

Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925 and was raised and spent her short life almost entirely in nearby Milledgeville, where her family had lived since before the Civil War. Although she limited herself to a rural, southern literary terrain and the body of her work was small, her place in twentieth-century American literature is secure.

She wrote steadily from 1948 until her death in 1964. For fourteen of those sixteen years she was plagued by lupus, a painful, wasting disease that she had inherited from her father and that kept her ever more confined and immobile. "I have never been anywhere but sick," she wrote. "In a sense sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow. Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don't have it miss one of God's great mercies."

She was educated at the Georgia State, College for Women from which she graduated in 1945. She then went off to the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. After receiving her M.F.A. there in 1947, O'Connor returned to Milledgeville to live with her widowed mother. Her first novel, Wise Blood, published in 1952 when she was 27, centers on a fanatical preacher of the "Church of God without Christ," who insists that "the blind don't see, the lame don't walk, and what's dead stays that way", but who nevertheless is consumed by a passion to imitate His sufferings. She followed that novel with a short story collection, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955), a second novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960), which concerns a backwoods prophet and his atheist nephew locked in struggle for the prophet's grandson. Another collection of stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge, was published posthumously in 1965. The Complete Stories (1971) won her a posthumous National Book Award.

From the first, she was recognized as a satirist of astonishing originality and vigor, whose targets were smugness, optimism and self-righteousness. However, the essential element of Flannery O'Con­nor's life and work was that she was born a Roman Catholic and that she remained one without the slightest wavering of faith throughout her thirty-nine years, A thunder-and-lightning Christian belief pervades every story and novel she ever wrote. Her attraction to the grotesque and the violent puts off many critics and readers. hey fail to appreciate that the violent motifs in her fiction grow from her passionate, Christian vision of our secular times. What she wanted to tell us, in a voice that could not be ignored, was that in our rationality we had lost the one essential - a spiritual center for our lives.

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