Guest Author - Sharon Cullars
To many readers, the cadence of the southern voice will forever be eloquently expressed in the works of Faulkner who even today is held as the premiere writer of the South. Yet there was another voice, a purveyor of the subtle nuances and quiet mannerisms of that region who left a legacy of stories long after her untimely death in 1964 at the age of 39. Flannery O’Connor, daughter of the "Christ-haunted South", was born to a Catholic family in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925, an area deep in the Bible belt with strong Protestant ties. The spiritual tradition of her birth place influenced much of O’Connor’s writings, as she once described in her essay "The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South" (1969). Religion figured prominently in her first novel, Wise Blood, where protagonist, Hazel Mote, returns from the army with his faith skewered and attempts to start a church without Christ (a church aptly named The Church Without Christ) whose parishioners border on the strange and deranged. The focus on religion continued into her second novel, The Violent Bear it Away, where again the protagonist is a minister gone astray.
Despite the success of her novels, O’Connor is better known for her short stories, which she took much joy in writing. However, with joy came tribulation. A few years following her graduation from college (she attended Georgia State College for Women in Milledgeville, her mother’s birthplace), O’Connor was diagnosed with lupus, the same disease that killed her father when O’Connor was a child. Yet she did not let the disease impede her desire to write.
One of her most prominent stories, A Good Man is Hard to Find (included in an anthology of the same name), was written at a time when O’Connor’s disease had progressed to the point where she had to use crutches. But in tribulation, there was triumph, as the story, a chilling tale of a family enroute on a trip who encounter three fugitive killers, eventually became lauded as her finest work. Overall, O’Connor wrote six collections of stories, all with underlying themes of spirituality and redemption in a post-WWII society.
Another recurrent theme in O’Connor’s works was race and its role and influence in the South, most effectively examined in her collection, The Artificial Nigger. O’Connor did not back away from the flammatory attitudes of many Southerners, but pulled the covers back on sweet grandmothers who didn’t hesitate to use the word "nigger" and "pickaninnies". Of course, in later years, controversy followed (as it did with Twain’s Huckleberry Finn), and in some places the book was banned, even though the stories were an attempt to show the moral blindness and blatant idiocy of bigots.
In 1961, O’Connor spoke at the Southern Writers Workshop at the University of Georgia. Her remarks were published in the August 10, 1961 edition of The Athens Banner-Herald. During her address, O’Connor stated that she never got emotionally involved with her story but wrote "with a straight poker face." And yet her stories evoke emotions even now: fear, anger, confusion, and hope. They also provide canvasses on which O’Connor painted haunting and enduring portraits of the South, reminiscent of Faulkner, but with their own hues and colors.
During her lifetime, O’Connor received three First Prize honors from the O. Henry Memorial Awards. Posthumously, in 1972, she was awarded with the National Book Award for The Complete Short Stories. And her legacy continues through her tales. Read one now - A Good Man is Hard to Find, a story that is part of a collection quoted on the cover by Time Magazine as "...Highly unladylike...a brutal irony, a slam-bang humor, and a style of writing as balefully direct as a death sentence."
