Flannery O'Connor

Background Born: 25 March 1925 Birthplace: Savannah, Georgia

Background Best known for short stories Most Famous: "A Good Man is Hard To

Find" (1953) and "Everything That Rises Must Converge" (1961).

Stories are populated with misfits and fanatics

Address issues of violence and spiritual faith.

The Complete Short Stories of Flannery O'Connor, won the National Book Award in 1972 posthumously

Family Only child of Regine Cline and

Edwin Francis O'Connor Both parents from Catholic

families; lived in the South for generations.

Late 1930s her father developed disseminated lupus; untreatable• Father died in 1941

Education 1945 - Graduated from Georgia State

College for Women in Milledgeville • degree in social science

Attended Writers' Workshop at the State University of Iowa• Received a Master of Fine Arts degree (1947)

• Published her first short story

Lupus• Dec. 1950: ill on train Diagnosed as having lupus cortisone made the disease treatable, but it was still considered incurable

in and out of the hospital• Moved to "Andalusia" With mother; ran dairy farm Inspired her later stories Spent remaining 14 years of life there

“Wickedly funny, realistic, displaying her sharp eye for the comic and the grotesque and her accurate ear for Southern speech, often ending in unexpected and shocking violence”

Describing her work Took her Catholicism seriously Stories about original sin Described her work in general as

being about: • the action of grace in the world in the form

of violence• sometimes opening their eyes to an

appalling realization, sometimes killing them.

• (DEXTER-the TV show)

Late 1950s, Early 1960s Hip problems Still spoke at colleges and writers’

conferences “ A writer with Christian concerns”

interested both in the everyday reality seen all around and in making that everyday reality transparent to the underlying level of mystery, the level of the eternal and the absolute.

Death 1964: abdominal surgery

• lupus reacted to the stress of the surgery

• could not be controlled by drugs

• kidney failure• died in the Milledgeville Hospital on August 3, 1964.

Quote

"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."

Frailty Clip http://

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hjgxl8-KyE0&feature=related&safety_mode=true&persist_safety_mode=1