A re-post featuring my favorite short story author. Um, has anyone else noticed how hard it is to homeschool and get absolutely anything else done? No? Just me, then…

It’s the birthday of Flannery O’Connor (b. 1925), one of the greatest American fiction writers and a master of the short story form. As both a Southern Gothic writer and a devout Roman Catholic, her work is noted for containing acts of brutality and violence that serve to strip characters of their illusions and self-centeredness, bringing them to moments of possible grace.

O’Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, to Edward F. O’Connor and Regina Cline, and had a particularly close relationship with her father, who encouraged her creativity. Edward developed systemic lupus erythematosus, which O’Connor would inherit, and his health went downhill around the time the family moved to Milledgeville, where Regina was from. Edward died when O’Connor was just fifteen.

O’Connor stayed on in Milledgeville and studied at Georgia State College for Women, where she edited a literary magazine and was known for her cartoons. After graduating in 1945, she went to the State University of Iowa (as the U of Iowa was then known) to study journalism, but quickly transferred to the Writers’ Workshop to pursue a master’s in creative writing. Her Southern accent was so thick that Paul Engle, the director, couldn’t understand her when they first met and had to ask her to write down what she was saying.

In 1948, O’Connor was accepted at Yaddo, an artist’s colony in New York, where she worked on her first novel, Wise Blood. Soon after this she began boarding at the Connecticut home of her friends Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, and had a productive couple of years communing with them (they were fellow Catholics), but in 1950 the lupus struck, and O’Connor was forced to return to the family farm where she lived with her mother for the rest of her life. She and her mother raised peafowl. She wrote in a letter: “I myself am afflicted with time, as I do not work out on account of an energy-depriving ailment and my work in, being creative, can go on only a few hours a day. I live on a farm and don’t see many people. My avocation is raising peacocks, something that requires everything of the peacock and nothing of me, so time is always at hand” (from a letter to “A.” on August 2, 1955, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor, ed. Sally Fitzgerald, 1979).

Reviews of Wise Blood (1952) were mixed, but her first collection of short stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, and Other Stories (1955) established her reputation. In 1960 she published her novel, The Violent Bear It Away. In 1964 O’Connor had surgery for a fibroid tumor, and this caused the lupus to attack again. Her health deteriorated and she died on August 3, 1964, at 39. Her second collection of stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge, was published posthumously in 1965.

Best line from a short story ever: “‘She would have been a good woman,’ The Misfit said, ‘if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life’” (from “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”).

Have a fine Wednesday sheltering in place, accept the grace extended to you, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.