Flannery O’Connor: The Queen of the One-Liners

Flannery O’Connor: The Queen of the One-Liners. (this post is in process and will be completed soon)

“All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it.” (Flannery O’Connor).

Brief Bio. Mary Flannery O’Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925, and died from kidney failure in 1964 at 39 years of age. During her brief but productive life as a brilliant and unconventional author, she suffered from advancing stages of a fatal, incurable disease, lupus, which gradually breaks down all the major body systems until they no longer function. Despite this ongoing, painful sickness, she was able to become a highly celebrated writer who developed a completely unique vision of Christian fiction that resulted in her being named by many critics as the most important Christian writer this country has ever produced. Because of her “unorthodox orthodoxy” style of writing, she was often misunderstood, with her writings described as vulgar, hilarious, profane, sacred, blasphemous, ironic, outrageous, grotesque, profound, repulsive, racist, realistic, seedy, freakish, extreme and shocking. Flannery was born into an Irish Catholic family and remained a devout Catholic her whole life. She and her mother woke up every morning for their 6:00 a.m. prayers and proceeded directly to their daily Mass at church. She was noted for being quite a fascinating intellectual who considered herself a “hillbilly Thomist.” The main characters in her stories were false prophets and street preachers, prostitutes and juvenile delinquents, murderers and adulterers, sideshow freaks and tattoo artists, hardscrabble farmers and undereducated door-to-door Bible salesmen, and hopeless amputees. Flannery refused to be sentimental in her faith or in her stories, unwilling to “tidy-up reality.” Because of her personal and professional complexity, and in her refusal to write what passed as “normal” fiction, perhaps the best way to begin to understand her is through her own words…

Flannery O’Connor’s Published Works: 

… three short story collections: “A Good Man Is Hard To Find;” “Everything That Rises Must Converge;” and “The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor,” which won the U.S. National Book Award.

… two novels: “Wise Blood,” and “The Violent Bear It Away.”

… a collection of essays: “Mystery and Manners.”

… a collection of letters: “The Habit of Being.”