Great Writers: Flannery O'Connor Told of Small-Town Life in the South

Written by Richard Thorman

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VOICE ONE:

I'm Shirley Griffith.

VOICE TWO:

And I'm Ray Freeman with the VOA Special English program, People in America.

Today, we tell about writer Flannery O’Connor.

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VOICE ONE:

Flannery O'Connor

Late in her life someone asked the American writer Flannery O’Connor why she

wrote. She said, "Because I am good at it. "

She was good. Yet, she was not always as good a writer as she became. She

improved because she listened to others. She changed her stories. She re-wrote

them, then re-wrote them again, always working to improve what she was

creating.

Flannery had always wanted to be a writer. After she graduated from Georgia

State College for women, she asked to be accepted at a writing program at the

State University of Iowa. The head of the school found it difficult to

understand her southern speech. He asked her to write what she wanted. Then he

asked to see some examples of her work.

He saw immediately that the writing was full of imagination and bright with

knowledge, like Flannery O’Connor herself.

VOICE TWO:

Mary Flannery O’Connor was born March twenty-fifth, nineteen twenty-five, in

the southern city of Savannah, Georgia.

The year she was born, her father developed a rare disease called lupus. He

died of the disease in nineteen forty-one. By that time the family was living

in the small southern town of Milledgeville, Georgia, in a house owned by

Flannery's mother.

Life in a small town in the American South was what O’Connor knew best. Yet

she said, "If you know who you are, you can go anywhere. "

VOICE ONE:

Many people in the town of Milledgeville thought she was different from other

girls. She was kind to everyone, but she seemed to stand to one side of what

was happening, as if she wanted to see it better. Her mother was her example.

Her mother said, "I was brought up to be nice to everyone and not to tell my

business to anyone. "

Flannery also did not talk about herself. But in her writing a silent and

distant anger explodes from the quiet surface of her stories. Some see her as

a Roman Catholic religious writer. They see her anger as the search to save

her moral being through her belief in Jesus Christ. Others do not deny her

Roman Catholic religious beliefs. Yet they see her not writing about things,

but presenting the things themselves.

VOICE TWO:

When she left the writing program at Iowa State University she was invited to

join a group of writers at the Yaddo writers' colony. Yaddo is at Saratoga

Springs in New York state. It provides a small group of writers with a home

and a place to work for a short time.

The following year, nineteen forty-nine, she moved to New York City. She soon

left the city and lived with her friend Robert Fitzgerald and his family in

the northeastern state of Connecticut. Fitzgerald says O’Connor needed to be

alone to work during the day. And she needed her friends to talk to when her

work was done.

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VOICE ONE:

While writing her first novel, “Wise Blood”, she was stricken with the

disease, lupus, that had killed her father. The treatment for lupus weakened

her. She moved back to Georgia and lived the rest of her life with her mother

on a farm outside Milledgeville. O’Connor was still able to write, travel,

and give speeches.

“Wise Blood” appeared in nineteen fifty-two. Both it and O’Connor's second

novel, “The Violent Bear it Away,” are about a young man growing up. In both

books the young men are unwilling to accept the work they were most fit to do.

Like all of Flannery O’Connor's writing, the book is filled with humor, even

when her meaning is serious. It shows the mix of a traditional world with a

modern world. It also shows a battle of ideas expressed in the simple, country

talk that O’Connor knew very well.

VOICE TWO:

In “Wise Blood”, a young man, Hazel Motes, leaves the Army but finds his

home town empty. He flees to a city, looking for "a place to be.” On the

train, he announces that he does not believe in Jesus Christ. He says, "I

wouldn't even if he existed. Even if he was on this train. "