This week's post is authored by Alyson Swindler, December graduate and former part-time writing tutor on the St. Augustine campus (we miss you, Alyson:)). After taking Alex Asbille's Women's Literature class, Alyson became a fan of Flannery O'Connor. She hopes that you will pick up a copy of O'Connor's books after reading her blog entry! Enjoy! 

Savannah, GA and Flannery O’Connor

Last month I graduated from SJR with my Associate in Arts, and I wanted to celebrate with a trip to Savannah, GA. Being a staunch advocate of doing things, and more importantly, enjoying things by myself–movies, restaurants, parks, etc–I wanted to challenge myself a bit by undertaking my first one-woman, out-of-state trip. I chose Savannah because it’s relatively close, and I had been there before with my family, but I also wanted to visit the birthplace of one of my favorite female authors: Flannery O’Connor.

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O'Connor with her peacock

I was introduced to O’Connor by my Composition 2 class where we read “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “Good Country People.” These stories intrigued me because they confused me. How does a nice Catholic lady who raised peacocks write about a roadside bandit murdering a family of six? How is a story about a bible salesman who steals a woman’s fake leg an allegory for performative Christianity? O’Connor’s ability to captivate, challenge, and confound her readers has been commended by innumerable critics, but when I went to Savannah, I was curious to learn about the woman behind the stories.

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Marker for O'Connor's home in Savannah, GA

When Flannery O’Connor’s childhood home was on the market in 1989, President and Professors from Armstrong Atlantic State University (now part of GSU) jumped at the opportunity to preserve a piece of niche, literary history. The house is tiny—only 18 feet wide—but the family grew up fairly well off. They even had a refrigerator in the 1920s when most Americans didn’t get one for another 30 years. O’Connor lived in this house only until she was eight, but her childhood was formative of her later personality and literary themes. For example, at age six, she sat down with her mom and dad and informed them that she would henceforth be calling them Ed and Regina. At this age, she also started reviewing children’s books. All she had to say regarding The Fairy Babies, was “not a very good book.” Clearly, she was already exhibiting traits of a potent, promising author.

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O'Connor as book critic

It was surreal being in the house where this great American author was brought up. I think that popular books and stories can become so inflated and talked about that people idealize the author rather than remember them as a person. Flannery O’Connor knew she was different from a young age, and she embraced her uniqueness to create stories that no one else could.

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O'Connor's Savannah kitchen

Final Flannery fun fact: At age five, Flannery had a chicken who walked backwards, and she was featured on a newsreel that you can still find on YouTube. Check it out: O'Connor's Backward-walking Chicken.

The library at SJRState has a vast collection of O’Connor’s works, as well as critical texts. Check her out!

 

Cover ArtFlannery o'Connor: Collected Works (LOA #39) by Flannery O'Connor
ISBN: 0940450372
Publication Date: 1988-09-01
In her short lifetime, Flannery O'Connor became one of the most distinctive American writers of the twentieth century. By birth a native of Georgia and a Roman Catholic, O'Connor depicts, in all its comic and horrendous incongruity, the limits of worldly wisdom and the mysteries of divine grace in the "Christ-haunted" Protestant South. This Library of America collection, the most comprehensive ever published, contains all of her novels and short-story collections, as well as nine other stories, eight of her most important essays, and a selection of 259 witty, spirited, and revealing letters, twenty-one published here for the first time. Her fiction brilliantly explores the human obsession with seemingly banal things. It might be a new hat or clean hogs or, for Hazel Motes, hero of Wise Blood (1952), an automobile. "Nobody with a good car needs to be justified," Hazel assures himself while using its hood for a pulpit to preach his "Church Without Christ." As in O'Connor's subsequent work, the characters in this novel are driven to violence, even murder, and their strong vernacular endows them with the discomforting reality of next-door neighbors. "In order to recognize a freak," she remarks in one of her essays, "you have to have a conception of the whole man." In the title story of her first, dazzling collection of stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955), the old grandmother discovers the comic irrelevance of good manners when she and her family meet up with the sinister Misfit, who claims there is "no pleasure but meanness." The terror of urban dislocation in "The Artificial Nigger," the bizarre baptism in "The River," or one-legged Hulga Hopewell's encounter with a Bible salesman in "Good Country People"--these startling events give readers the uneasy sense of mysteries about to be revealed. Her second novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960), casts the shadow of the Old Testament across a landscape of backwoods shacks, modern towns, and empty highways. Caught between the prophetic fury of his great-uncle and the unrelenting rationalism of his uncle, fourteen-year-old Francis Tarwater undergoes a terrifying trial of faith when he is commanded to baptize his idiot cousin. The nine stories in Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) show O'Connor's powers at their height. The title story is a terrifying, heart-rending drama of familial and racial misunderstanding. "Revelation" and "The Enduring Chill" probe further into conflicts between parental figures and recalcitrant offspring, where as much tension is generated from quiet conversation as from the physical violence of gangsters and fanatics. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.