“The South impresses its image on the Southern writer from the moment he is able to distinguish one sound from another. He takes it in through his ears and hears it again in his own voice, and, by the time he is able to use his imagination for fiction, he finds that his senses respond irrevocably to a certain reality, and particularly to the sound of a certain reality. The Southern writer’s greatest tie with the South is through his ear.”

—Flannery O’Conner (1963)

A Good Woman Is Hard to Find: Flannery O’Conner

Mary Flannery O’Conner was born in Savannah in 1925. This en Plein air painting of her childhood home is now a museum dedicated to her life. It is located on Lafayette Square in Savannah’s Historic District.

Flannery O’Conner spent most of her shortened life writing in Georgia. She died at age-39 from lupus, the autoimmune disease that had also taken her father’s life when Flannery was just a teenager.

O’Conner was a lifelong devout Catholic and became a great writer who wrote in what many experts claim as an acerbic Southern Gothic style. Her main characters were generally grotesque, perverse, and quite often violent. She witnessed her fellow Southerners as flawed and Christ-haunted and in endless need of redemption; naturally, in monitoring these flaws, she included herself.

For example, my favorite of her two novels, Wise Blood, offers us a 22-year-old Hazel Motes, who knew when he was twelve that he would become a preacher like his grandfather before him. He begins preaching for The Church of Truth Without Jesus Christ Crucified, commits murder, and blinds himself. The rest needs to be read with your eyes. I promise the effort will be as unforgettable as a train wreck.

O’Conner may have been a ‘church lady’ concerned about judgment day, but she wrote about characters who were less than sympathetic. Indeed, many of them were flat out looney-tunes. Still, mad in a good way for us readers—for redemption remains a possibility for all. Often, characters who believe themselves smart and sophisticated generally learn otherwise by the end of her stories.

Her only other novel is entitled: The Violent Bear It Away. The title is a clue for what is included in its plot, and was taken directly from Matthew 11:12 in Flannery’s Douay-Rheims Catholic Bible: “From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away.” It’s about a prophet, unlike any prophet you may have read of before. Read it when you can.

In truth, Flannery O’Conner is known best for her fabulous short stories. A Good Man is Hard to Find is her most notable. It was assigned reading in a class I attended at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), and I have been a Flannery O’Conner fan ever since. Naturally, that ‘good man’ isn’t so good.

In recent months, much has been written about Flannery O’Conner and her confrontation with the realities of race relations in her day. Remember, she died young in 1964 in the middle of the Civil Rights Era and was raised in the deep South at a time when Jim Crow ruled the political-lives of Georgians.

An extremely good and I think the fair study has emerged just this summer in a book entitled Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Conner by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell. Professor O’Donnell explains in exquisite detail of Flannery O’Conner’s complex Race-haunted and God-haunted Southern world and how she, along with friends and family struggled with her better angles in navigating its harsh realities.