O'CONNOR, MARY FLANNERY

Novelist and short-story writer; b. Savannah, Ga., March 25, 1925; d. Milledgeville, Ga., Aug. 3, 1964. She was the daughter of Edward Francis and Regina (Cline) O'Connor, of a pioneer Georgia Catholic family. At the age of 12 she moved with her parents to the Cline family home at Milledgeville. There she attended Peabody High School and graduated (1945) from Georgia State College for Women. She later (1948) studied creative writing at the University of Iowa. The initial attack of an incurable malady brought her home from New York a year later to live with her mother on the farm near Milledgeville, where she spent her remaining years.

Quiet and kind-heartedly humorous, O'Connor was committed to a Christian iconoclasm against the fraudulence and pietism of a secular age. She sought to make "the distortions in modern life" apparent to those "used to seeing them as natural." She did this through an original use of humor, horrendous satire, and violence in two novels and a score of stories. Her work, first meeting with hostility and dismay, won wide literary acclaim in the United States and abroad, and within a decade she was accorded front rank and received many recognitions. Her first novel, Wise Blood (1952, reissued 1960), is the story of a lunatic-fringe preacher who tries to found a church without Christ. Preaching a progressive nihilism, he backs his way into the Cross. The novel parodies the atheistic existentialism then pervading the literary and philosophical scene. (see existentialism in literature). In A Good Man Is Hard To Find (1955), a collection of ten of her stories, O'Connor created a new form of humor to bare "the distortions." She employed it perhaps nowhere with more impact than in the title story. There, what is apparently secular satire on the accidental encounter of a gabbling grandmother and her unlovely family with a psychotic criminal who calls himself the Misfit turns into a religious ordeal that brings the grandmother salvation, along with a bloody slaughter. The story of Jonas (with emphasis on the action at sea) provides the theme of her second novel, (The Violent Bear It Away, 1960) and, in variation, of a later story, The Lame Shall Enter First. These dramas probe deeply the theology of free will (which she viewed as a conflict of wills in the sinner) and freedom (which she called a mystery). Nine of her last stories appeared posthumously in Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965), confirming further that the violent themes of her works conceal an apocalypse for her time.

Bibliography: m. f. o'connor, "The Lame Shall Enter First," Sewanee Review 70 (1962) 337–379. Current Biography (1958) 317–318. j. f. farnham, "The Grotesque in the Novels of F. O'C.," America 105 (May 13, 1961).

[b. cheney]