Flannery O’Connor
| Flannery O'Connor | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born | Mary Flannery O'Connor March 25, 1925 Savannah, Georgia, US |
| Died | August 3, 1964 (aged 39) Milledgeville, Georgia, US |
| Occupation |
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| Period | 1946–64 |
| Genre | Southern Gothic |
| Subject | |
| Literary movement | Christian Realism |
| Notable works | |
Mary Flannery O'Connor (March 25, 1925 – August 3, 1964) was an American writer and essayist. An important voice in American literature, she wrote two novels and thirty-two short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. She was a Southern writer who often wrote in a Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters. Her writing also reflected her Roman Catholic faith and frequently examined questions of morality and ethics. Her posthumously compiled Complete Stories won the 1972 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and has been the subject of enduring praise.
O'Connor was born on March 25, 1925, in Savannah, Georgia, the only child of Edward Francis O'Connor, a real estate agent, and Regina Cline. As an adult, she remembered herself as a "pigeon-toed child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I'll-bite-you complex."
When she was six, living in a house still standing (now preserved as the Flannery O'Connor Childhood Home), she experienced her first brush with celebrity status. The Pathé News people filmed "Little Mary O'Connor" with her trained chicken and showed the film around the country. She said: "When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathé News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been an anticlimax."
O'Connor and her family moved to Milledgeville, Georgia, in 1940 to live on Andalusia Farm, which is now a museum dedicated to O'Connor's work. In 1937, her father was diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus; it led to his eventual death on February 1, 1941, and O'Connor and her mother continued to live in Milledgeville.
O'Connor attended Peabody High School, where she worked as the school newspaper's art editor and from which she graduated in 1942. She entered Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College & State University) in an accelerated three-year program and graduated in June 1945 with a social sciences degree. While at Georgia College, she produced a significant amount of cartoon work for the student newspaper.
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