Flannery O'Connor
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49 free Flannery O'Connor trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Flannery O'Connor called the South Christ-haunted and wrote it that way: a one-legged philosopher robbed by a Bible salesman, a grandmother who finds grace at gunpoint, a war veteran preaching the Church Without Christ from the hood of an Essex. She produced two novels and 31 stories from a Georgia farm full of peacocks while lupus took her at 39, and her Complete Stories later won the National Book Award. These 49 questions cover the life and the work. Easy ones ask about Southern Gothic, Savannah, lupus and the Misfit; the middle tier reaches Hazel Motes, Asa Hawks, Pitty Sing, Hulga, Tarwater, John Huston's film and the backward-walking chicken; the hard tier wants Modern Writing I, Teilhard de Chardin, the Tower restaurant, Betty Hester, Paul Engle, Memory Hill and the word Shiftlet teaches Lucynell. The 2023 biopic Wildcat and the 2024 unfinished novel get their turn too. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss. Play it solo or print it for a book club.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Flannery O'Connor's fiction is usually filed under which literary style?
Southern Gothic
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.
Q 02In which Georgia city was Flannery O'Connor born in 1925?
Savannah
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.
Q 03Apart from two novels, O'Connor's fiction took which form?
Short stories
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.
Q 04What disease, the same one that had killed her father, ended O'Connor's life at 39?
Lupus
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.
Q 05What did O'Connor's mother run at Andalusia?
Dairy farm
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.
Q 06O'Connor earned her MFA in 1947 from which famous program?
Iowa Writers' Workshop
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.
Q 07Why did O'Connor drop her first name, Mary, as a graduate student?
It sounded like an Irish washwoman
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.
Q 08In O'Connor's 1952 novel Wise Blood, a street preacher founds a church without whom?
Christ
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.
Q 09Which returning soldier, who takes to preaching from his car, is the hero of Wise Blood?
Hazel Motes
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.
Q 10In Wise Blood, what does preacher Asa Hawks pretend to be?
Blind
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.
Q 11In Wise Blood, what is Enoch Emery's job?
Zookeeper
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.
Q 12What make of car does the preacher of Wise Blood use as his pulpit?
An Essex
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.
Q 13Who directed the 1979 film of Wise Blood?
John Huston
John Huston also stepped in front of the camera, giving himself the tiny part of the hero's fanatical preacher grandfather.
Q 21In "Good Country People", Hulga's artificial leg is stolen by a man selling what?
Bibles
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.
Q 22In "Good Country People", what was Hulga's name before she changed it?
Joy
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.
Q 23In "Good Country People", Hulga holds a doctorate in which subject?
Philosophy
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.
Q 14Who played the lead role in the 1979 film Wise Blood?
Brad Dourif
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.
Q 15Which escaped convict confronts the family in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find"?
The Misfit
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.
Q 16In "A Good Man Is Hard to Find", the family is driving from Georgia to which state?
Florida
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.
Q 17What is the name of the cat the grandmother smuggles along in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find"?
Pitty Sing
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.
Q 18Where does the family stop for barbecue in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find"?
The Tower
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.
Q 19In "A Good Man Is Hard to Find", the grandmother would have been good if someone had what?
Shot her every minute of her life
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.
Q 20In O'Connor's story "Revelation", what does a furious student call smug Mrs Turpin in a doctor's waiting room?
An old wart hog
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.
Q 24In The Violent Bear It Away, the hero drowns his cousin during what?
A baptism
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.
Q 25In The Violent Bear It Away, what destiny has Francis Tarwater's great-uncle prepared him for?
Life as a prophet
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.
Q 26In The Violent Bear It Away, Rayber, the uncle Francis flees to, works as what?
A schoolteacher
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.
Q 27In O'Connor's "Everything That Rises Must Converge", a mother and son quarrel over integration where?
City bus
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.
Q 28The title Everything That Rises Must Converge derives from which thinker's work?
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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.
Q 29Which O'Connor story follows a heavily tattooed man who hopes one last tattoo will win over his disapproving wife?
Parker's Back
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.
Q 30O'Connor's story "Judgement Day" was a drastic rewrite of which earlier story?
The Geranium
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.