Born in Savannah, Georgia, on March 25, 1925, Mary Flannery O’ Connor was the only child of a Catholic family living in the middle of the Protestant Bible Belt. Her father, Edward O’Connor, was a former mayor and realtor who died in 1941 and her mother, Regina, came from a prominent southern family. When she was 12, her family moved to Milledgeville, which was her mother’s birthplace. She graduated Georgia State College For Women in 1945, and continued her studies at the University of Iowa where she also attended the prestigious Iowa Writer’s Workshop conducted by Paul Engle. She published her first short story, “Geranium” in a publication called “Accent” at the age of 21. At 22, she earned a Master of Fine Arts in Literature degree and began to write her first novel. “Wise Blood in Mademoiselle” appeared in 1952.
In 1950, she suffered her first attack from disseminated lupus, a debilitating blood disease that had killed her father. Until 1951 she lived and wrote in the Ridgefield, Connecticut home of two New York friends, Robert and Sally Fitzgerald. When her illness took over, she returned to live in Georgia with her mother on her dairy farm, “Andalusia”. Obsessed with birds of all kinds, there she raised and nurtured more than 100 peafowl, often incorporating their images in her creations. Despite her illness, she continued to write regularly and lecture about creative writing in colleges. In a 1952 interview, she said, “I write every day for at least two hours and I spend the rest of my time largely in the society of ducks.”
From 1955 she was forced to use crutches. An abdominal surgery reactivated the lupus and she died on August 3, 1964, at the age of 39. Her second collection of stories, “Everything That Rises Must Converge” was published posthumously in 1965.
Particularly acclaimed for her stories, which combined the comic with the tragic and the brutal, O’Connor was part of a Southern gothic tradition that focused on the decaying South and its people along with the likes of William Faulkner, Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers. In her short lifetime, she wrote two novels and thirty-one short stories. Her voice was unique, brilliant and all the more heart breaking because it speaks no more.
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