“A pigeon-toed child with a receding chin and you-leave-me-alone-or-I’ll-bite-you complex.”
The spiritual and likely virginal duchess of Deep South Georgia, USA. O’Connor’s name burns on by right of her grimly cynical Southern Gothic prose. More approachable than Truman Capote, more coherent than William Faulkner, she wrote about one and a half anthologies worth of short stories and a couple of novels before dying at the unfulfilled age of 39.
What did she love? Peacocks, mostly. She bred and raised them on her farm. Why? Who knows; they lay useless eggs, eat fussy diets, and the males live only to look pretty and hope they get laid for it, like all Southern gentlemen. Presumably she also loved her mother, or maybe she was just stuck with her after the father died from lupus. She likely loved God in her own skeptical Irish-Catholic way.
All but the first and last of her stories are set in Georgia. These settings mimic the towns and abysses that she knew best. But Flannery isn’t some oblivious bumpkin. After graduating on an accelerated track at Georgia State, she showed up late to the infamous Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In spite of her tardiness, she was admitted by the crowned lecturer and second-ever director of the Workshop, Paul Engle. He found her accent incomprehensible and had to ask her to write what she was trying to say to him on a piece of paper. She wrote: “My name is Flanner O’Connor. I am not a journalist. Can I come to the Writer’s Workshop?”. Engle asked her for some writing samples and, after reading, waved her in.
“Flannery spoke a dialect beyond instant comprehension but on the page her prose was imaginative, tough, alive: just like Flannery herself.”
Paul Engle
After finishing at the Workshop she stomped around New York City for a bit but ultimately lived out the rest of her days back in small town Georgia with her peacocks and her mother. Despite her mostly isolated life she had a sharp sense of humor that she capably transferred to text, as well as an uncanny grasp of the nuances of human behavior.
She died slowly. Diagnosed with her father’s killer when she was 27, she finally succumbed to it in the August of her 39th year.
The Normal Times 