A month before she died aged 39, on 3 August 1964, of complications from the autoimmune disease lupus, the American writer Flannery O’Connor wrote from her home in Milledgeville, Georgia to a regular correspondent, the academic and nun Sister Mariella Gable: “The wolf, I’m afraid, is inside tearing up the place.”
The “wolf” that O’Connor refers to is her illness, the name of which derives from the Latin. The disease can be mild, but in its worst form it is systemic, causing not only inflammation, chronic fatigue, muscle weakness and skin rashes, but also permanent tissue damage. In her last years, O’Connor could only move around by means of crutches, tending to her beloved pet peacocks. “I can write for one hour a day, and my, my, do I like my one hour. I eat it up like it was filet mignon.”
Before diagnosis at the age of 25, O’Connor had been a talented graduate student with an MFA from the prestigious University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and had completed a coveted Yaddo artists’ colony residency in upstate New York. A draft of her first novel, published as Wise Blood in 1952, and filmed by John Huston in 1979, won a prize; she had become involved in the New York City literary scene, acquired an agent, and was close friends with the poet Robert Lowell and others of his circle. She also lived for a while in Connecticut with the classicist Robert Fitzgerald and his wife, Sally, who would go on to edit of The Habit of Being (1979), a vast volume of O’Connor’s correspondence. Venerable publisher Robert Giroux had her in his sights early on: he remained her editor throughout her life.
Her illness meant that in 1951 O’Connor moved back to what she termed the “Christ-haunted” south, to live with and be cared for by her widowed mother, Regina Cline O’Connor. They eventually settled at Andalusia, the O’Connor family summer home, a working farm just outside Milledgeville, Georgia, presided over by a large white classic Southern house straight out of a Tennessee Wiliams play, complete with veranda for rocking chairs. It that is now a museum preserving O’Connor’s work and legacy. The land was formerly a cotton plantation; O’Connor satirised her upbringing in the Jim Crow-era segregated south in sardonic stories of hypocritical, racist and godless southerners, while at times revealing unpalatable personal views in her letters – “the habit of bigotry”, as critic Paul Elie wrote, in a 2020 New Yorker essay titled “How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?”.
Mary Flannery O’Connor was born on 25 March 1925 in Savannah, the oldest city in Georgia, the only child of real estate agent Edward Francis O’Connor and Regina Cline, who was from an old southern family. Of Irish descent, the O’Connors’ Catholicism made them a minority in the heavily Protestant south. Her first taste of fame was at five years old, on a Pathé newsreel, featuring a chicken that “Mary O’Connor” had taught to walk backwards. “I was just there to assist the chicken, but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been anticlimax,” she joked. The determined chicken, walking backwards to go forward, is a tempting metaphor for O’Connor’s own endurance. It instilled in her a “love affair” with birds that seemed to transcend most human interactions. Ever self-deprecating, she described herself as a “pigeon-toed child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I’ll-bite-you complex”, an attitude apparent in her acerbic, droll letters, her wry fiction and the cartoons she drew for her student newspaper at Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College & State University), where she obtained a BA in sociology and literature in 1945. By this time O’Connor’s father had died, in early 1941, of the lupus that his daughter would inherit. Mother and daughter were left to their ambiguous, interdependent relationship. Notably, none of O’Connor’s letters to Regina has ever been published.
O’Connor’s novelistic ambitions would not entirely fold with the progression of her illness, but ironically it was her limited energy that made her into one of the most original short story writers of the 20th century, her acute and disturbing moral vision of humanity driven by a devout, if unconventionally expressed, Catholic faith. “When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little … when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock – to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures,” she wrote.
O’Connor’s frequently brutal fiction, with its distorted, unnatural characters, is usually categorised as “southern gothic”, a term initially coined dismissively by the novelist Ellen Glasgow in 1935 to describe the “backwoods” and “eccentric” fiction of writers such as William Faulkner. Faulkner was undoubtedly a great influence on O’Connor (and he admired Wise Blood), as was master of the grotesque Edgar Allan Poe, the Catholic French novelist François Mauriac, and her near-contemporary Katherine Anne Porter. O’Connor’s own influence can be traced in later writers such as Shirley Jackson, CE Morgan and Joyce Carol Oates.
Her characters hover somewhere between victim and villain: their fates are ordained; they do not appear to have free will. In what is probably her best known and most anthologised story, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1953), a prattling, controlling grandmother meets her appalling match in the Misfit, the homicidal leader of an escaped convict gang. The elderly woman and her son’s young family – each objectionable in their own way – are shot dead in turn by the gang when they crash their car on a road trip through Georgia – all because the grandmother insisted on having one last look at a house she remembers from her past. “The horrible thought she had had before the accident was that the house she had remembered so vividly was not in Georgia but in Tennessee … Behind them the line of woods gaped like a dark open mouth.”
“It should elicit from you a degree of pity and terror, even though its way of being serious is a comic one,” O’Connor said of that story, urging readers to ignore the “dead bodies” and focus on the transformative “action of grace” when the grandmother reaches out, fatally as it turns out, to the Misfit.
What should we make of O’Connor now, unfashionable in her time and hardly less so in ours, 100 years after her birth? Her reputation has been clouded since that 2020 New Yorker essay, although it has been argued that Elie’s disclosures were not new; the letters have been in the public domain since the late 70s. Hilton Als wrote of her Black characters in 2001: “She didn’t use them as vessels of sympathy or scorn; she simply – and complexly – drew from life.” Yet a major biography by Brad Gooch (Flannery O’Connor: A Life, 2009) admits her to be, in private, as Joy Williams put it in a New York Times review, “a connoisseur of racial jokes”.
O’Connor could be perversely contradictory, arguing both for and against integration, while lampooning racist white characters in stories like Revelation and Everything That Rises Must Converge. It was this deeply problematic aspect that caused director Ethan Hawke to hesitate over filming recent biopic Wildcat, which stars his actor daughter Maya as Flannery, alongside Laura Linney as Regina. Hawke and Linney also play most of the roles in the dramatisation of a selection of the stories. The performances are compelling, and Hawke ably transforms into O’Connor – bushy hair and eyebrows, steely spectacles, tell-tale lupus “butterfly” rash blazing across her cheeks. Disappointingly Wildcat sidesteps the question of the author’s racism, while delving into the mystery and conflict of her religious belief. In a 1959 letter she wrote: “What people don’t realise is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.” O’Connor defiantly carried that cross to the end.
• This article was amended on 25 March 2025. An earlier version said that Flannery O’Connor graduated in 1945 from “Georgia Women’s College (now Georgia State University)”; in fact, the institution’s name in 1945 was Georgia State College for Women, and it is now known as Georgia College & State University.
