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O’Connor and Her Works Mary Flannery O’Connor, an American writer, is best known for her stories of violence and religion. She belonged to the Southern Gothic era that concentrated on the disintegrating South and its condemned people. O’Connor was born on March 25, 1925 in Savannah, Georgia. Most of the southern states at the time were Catholic. Being from Georgia, which is considered part of the south, Catholicism had a great influence on O’Connor and her family. Not much was known about her mother except that she was from a well-known family (her father was a mayor) and her father was a realtor. Like O’Connor, her father died of complications from lupus. O’Connor was twelve years old at the time of her father’s death. As a result, her family was forced to move to Milledgeville, Georgia. In Milledgeville, she finished her schooling at Peabody High School where she helped edit the school newspaper; thus, the beginning of her literary career. After graduation, she enrolled at Georgia State College for Women and assisted with the college’s magazine, which greatly improved her literary skills. While at Georgia State, she dropped her first name Mary, and became just Flannery O’Connor. When she graduated from Georgia State in 1945, she continued her education at the University of Iowa to further her studies in writing. At the age of twenty-one and still at the University of Iowa, O’Connor published her first short story, entitled The Geranium, the only story O’Connor published while in college. The next year O’Connor received her Masters degree in Fine Arts in Literature. She spent one more year at the University and then moved to New York where she wrote the first four chapters of her first novel Wise Blood. This novel, Wise Blood, was about a man, Hazel Motes, who started a church, The Church of Christ Without Christ, without Christianity. The novel is full of irony and comedy as it relates to the Old Testament. The characters are one-dimensional, yet mysterious. The protagonist, Hazel Motes, like most sinners, loses himself in his struggle with and for transcendence. The story is “hard-edged, brutal, and unflinchingly, remorselessly centered on the painful necessity of achieving transcendence” (Reclaiming the Self, 2003). Not knowing much about the details of O’Connors’s life, one must wonder why her writings are of such violent nature, self-mortification, and self-renunciation (Reclaiming the Self, 2003). When I first read Wise Blood I asked myself, “Why would O’Connor write a story like this?” Like O’Connor, this story seems strange because her parents taught her that Christ does exist and that you must believe in Him to have eternal life.
Approximate Word count = 1612
Approximate Pages = 6.4
(250 words per page double spaced)
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