49 Fun Facts About Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor's fiction is usually filed under which literary style?

Southern Gothic trades in the grotesque, and she joked that Northern readers call anything from the South grotesque, unless it really is, when they call it realistic.

In which Georgia city was Flannery O'Connor born in 1925?

Savannah still has her childhood home because, when it came up for sale in 1989, a college president and two professors formed a foundation to buy it and open it as a museum.

Apart from two novels, O'Connor's fiction took which form?

Short stories: her name rests on two collections of them, and she lived to see only the first in print, because the second came out the year after she died.

What disease, the same one that had killed her father, ended O'Connor's life at 39?

Lupus killed her father when she was fifteen and struck her at twenty-five, on a winter journey home to Georgia; she wrote most of her fiction while living with it.

What did O'Connor's mother run at Andalusia?

Dairy farm: her mother ran it with the help of tenants, and capable farm women and their hired hands turn up all through the later stories.

O'Connor earned her MFA in 1947 from which famous program?

Iowa Writers' Workshop was not the plan: she arrived on a journalism scholarship, decided in her first term that reporting was not for her, and asked to join the fiction class instead.

Why did O'Connor drop her first name, Mary, as a graduate student?

It sounded like an Irish washwoman, she said, so the girl everyone at home called Mary Flannery shed the Mary just as she began to publish.

In O'Connor's 1952 novel Wise Blood, a street preacher founds a church without whom?

Christ: his Church Without Christ teaches that nobody needs saving, yet the preacher ends the book doing harsher penance than any church ever asked of him.

Which returning soldier, who takes to preaching from his car, is the hero of Wise Blood?

Hazel Motes comes home from the army to find his family gone, decides to believe in nothing, and buys a wreck of a car to preach it from.

In Wise Blood, what does preacher Asa Hawks pretend to be?

Blind is what he once promised to become: he announced he would burn out his eyes with quicklime at a revival, lost his nerve, and has begged as a sightless preacher ever since.

In Wise Blood, what is Enoch Emery's job?

Zookeeper suits a boy ruled by instinct: he ends the novel attacking a man in a gorilla suit, stealing the costume, burying his own clothes and putting it on.

What make of car does the preacher of Wise Blood use as his pulpit?

An Essex, bought for forty dollars and barely running, though he is convinced it is perfect; when a policeman shoves it over an embankment, his preaching career goes with it.

Who directed the 1979 film of Wise Blood?

John Huston also stepped in front of the camera, giving himself the tiny part of the hero's fanatical preacher grandfather.

Who played the lead role in the 1979 film Wise Blood?

Brad Dourif led a cast filled out with Georgia stage actors and local residents, and nearly the whole film was shot in and around the city of Macon.

Which escaped convict confronts the family in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find"?

The Misfit starts out as a newspaper scare: the grandmother waves the report of his escape to argue against the trip, and she is the one who later recognises him.

In "A Good Man Is Hard to Find", the family is driving from Georgia to which state?

Florida is her son's choice; the grandmother would rather see east Tennessee, and her detour down a dirt road in search of a half-remembered plantation is what dooms them.

What is the name of the cat the grandmother smuggles along in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find"?

Pitty Sing travels hidden in a basket because the grandmother will not leave him at home; startled, he springs onto her son's shoulder at the wheel and the car lands in a ditch.

Where does the family stop for barbecue in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find"?

The Tower is a run-down filling station and dance hall whose owner, Red Sammy Butts, grumbles to the grandmother that a good man is hard to find, handing the story its title.

In "A Good Man Is Hard to Find", the grandmother would have been good if someone had what?

Shot her every minute of her life, he says, moments after she has reached out to touch him, called him one of her own children, and been answered with three bullets.

In O'Connor's story "Revelation", what does a furious student call smug Mrs Turpin in a doctor's waiting room?

An old wart hog, she is told, who should go back to hell: the insult sends her home to quarrel with God beside her own hog pen, where she sees a vision of the people she looks down on climbing to heaven.

In "Good Country People", Hulga's artificial leg is stolen by a man selling what?

Bibles are his cover: one of them is hollowed out to hold whiskey, condoms and indecent playing cards, and he leaves her stranded in a barn loft without her leg.

In "Good Country People", what was Hulga's name before she changed it?

Joy was the name she was born with; she changed it as an adult purely to spite her mother, whose relentless cheerfulness she cannot bear.

In "Good Country People", Hulga holds a doctorate in which subject?

Philosophy has left her proud of believing in nothing, which is why the thief's parting boast, that he has believed in nothing since the day he was born, cuts so deep.

In The Violent Bear It Away, the hero drowns his cousin during what?

A baptism: the boy was raised to perform the rite his great-uncle never managed, and when he finally does it, the child drowns in the very same act.

In The Violent Bear It Away, what destiny has Francis Tarwater's great-uncle prepared him for?

Life as a prophet is the last thing the boy wants, and he runs to his rational uncle in the city to escape it, yet he ends the book accepting the call after all.

In The Violent Bear It Away, Rayber, the uncle Francis flees to, works as what?

A schoolteacher with a social scientist's faith in psychology, he sets out to reason the boy out of everything the old man taught him, and the boy resists him just as stubbornly.

In O'Connor's "Everything That Rises Must Converge", a mother and son quarrel over integration where?

City bus, newly integrated: a Black passenger boards in the very same hat the mother is wearing, and the story lends its name to a collection of nine.

The title Everything That Rises Must Converge derives from which thinker's work?

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a French Jesuit who pictured the whole world slowly rising toward union with God; O'Connor, a devout Catholic, took her title from that idea.

Which O'Connor story follows a heavily tattooed man who hopes one last tattoo will win over his disapproving wife?

Parker's Back is the only bare skin he has left, so he fills it with a stern Byzantine icon of the Saviour, sure it will move her; she calls it idolatry instead.

O'Connor's story "Judgement Day" was a drastic rewrite of which earlier story?

The Geranium was her first published story, in 1946; she kept returning to its homesick old Southerner stranded in a Northern city, and sent off the final version shortly before she died.

Who wrote the introduction to Everything That Rises Must Converge?

Robert Fitzgerald, the poet and translator, had been her landlord: she boarded for nearly two years in the apartment over his family's garage in Connecticut, and she named him her literary executor.

O'Connor's Complete Stories won which prize in 1972?

National Book Award for Fiction went to the collection eight years after her death, and in 2009 a public poll run by the award's own foundation voted it the best fiction winner in the prize's sixty years.

Which bird did O'Connor raise at Andalusia and celebrate in her essay "The King of the Birds"?

Peafowl roamed her mother's farm in ever-growing numbers, and the essay began life as a piece for the travel magazine Holiday on the trials of raising peacocks.

As a small child, O'Connor appeared in a Pathé newsreel with a chicken that did what?

Walked backward: Pathé News filmed the trick, and she joked ever after that it was the high point of her life and that everything since had been an anticlimax.

Which late-night television host wrote his senior thesis on the fiction of Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner?

Conan O'Brien, Harvard class of 1985, called it Literary Progeria: he argued that the prematurely aged children in both writers stand for a South made wise before its time by poverty and defeat.

O'Connor's collected letters, edited by Sally Fitzgerald, were published under what title?

Mystery and Manners collects her essays and lectures instead.

O'Connor's mysterious correspondent known only as "A" was later revealed to be whom?

Betty Hester was an Atlanta file clerk whose fan letter in 1955 drew near-weekly replies for nine years; she let them into print only under the letter A, for anonymous, and gave the originals to Emory University sealed for twenty years.

What did O'Connor reply when Mary McCarthy called the Eucharist merely symbolic?

"If it's a symbol, to hell with it" came out, by her own account, in a very shaky voice at a dinner of high-toned literary people, and was all the defence she felt capable of.

O'Connor regularly reviewed books for The Bulletin and The Southern Cross, which were what?

Catholic diocesan newspapers of limited circulation: both served dioceses in Georgia, and she filled their book pages with serious reviews, many of them of works of theology.

O'Connor left a third novel unfinished, and its surviving scenes reached print in 2024 under what title?

Why Do the Heathen Rage? survives only as a handful of scenes and scattered notes; she printed one fragment in Esquire the year before she died, and scholar Jessica Hooten Wilson pieced the rest together for the 2024 book.

Who played O'Connor in the 2023 biographical film Wildcat?

Maya Hawke, best known from Stranger Things, was directed by her father, Ethan Hawke, who also co-wrote the script; the film follows O'Connor as she struggles to get her first novel published.

In O'Connor's story "Greenleaf", proud farm owner Mrs May is finally killed by which unwelcome visitor to her land?

A stray bull: she drives out to see it shot, honks the horn impatiently, and the enraged animal charges out of the trees and gores her through the heart before her hired man can fire.

In "The Life You Save May Be Your Own", what first word does Shiftlet teach young Lucynell?

Bird is the first word she has ever spoken, taught by the drifter while he fixes up the farm; he marries her to get her mother's car, then abandons her asleep at a roadside diner.

O'Connor worked on Wise Blood at Yaddo, an artists' colony in which state?

New York is home to Yaddo, at Saratoga Springs; she carried the novel on to Connecticut and meant to stay in the North, until illness forced her home to Georgia for good.

Before graduate school, O'Connor drew cartoons for the student newspaper at which college?

Georgia State College for Women had her as its unofficial campus cartoonist: her work ran in nearly every issue of the student paper, in the yearbook, and even on the walls of the student lounge.

Admirers grumbled that O'Connor's 2015 US postage stamp left out which trademark of hers?

Cat-eye glasses were her visual signature, yet the stamp shows her as a student of about twenty, painted from a college photograph; it was the thirtieth in the Literary Arts series.

In O'Connor's "The Displaced Person", the hard-working refugee hired to rescue a failing farm is of what nationality?

Polish, and so capable that he shows up every other hand on the place: one of them lets a tractor run him down while the owner looks on and says nothing.

In which Milledgeville cemetery is O'Connor buried?

Memory Hill began as a twenty-acre public square in the town's original plan and became its burying ground instead; she lies there among early Georgia governors and legislators.

At Lourdes in 1958, O'Connor, by then on crutches, said she prayed not for her bones but for what?

Her next novel came first: a relative paid for the pilgrimage, and O'Connor, who joked that she could die for her religion sooner than take a bath for it, took the healing bath anyway.