Flannery O'Connor: Living and Writing in the Shadow of Death

Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don’t have it miss one of God’s mercies. Flannery O’Connor

I write her name with honor, for all the truth and all the craft which she shows man’s fall and dishonor. Thomas Merton, printed on book flap of O'Connor's When Everything That Rises Must Converge, published posthumously


When I was a boy, I wasn’t all that interested in reading. For my father, this was a sure sign of some hidden mental illness. He was obsessed with reading history, theology, and some philosophy. His strategy for converting me was to leave small biographies of people he knew I admired: Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, Einstein and Edison, Madam Curie and Florence Nightingale. While I devoured these pocketbook bios, I remained uninterested in what dad considered “serious reading.” This all changed my senior of High School, when I took a class in Honors American Prose and Literature, taught by Mrs. Cogar.

Mrs. Cogar didn’t merely teach American literature, she embodied it, making it come alive for me. To this very day, I can still remember the thrill I experienced when she would recite passages from Hemingway and Steinbeck, Faulkner and O’Connor. When she spoke, it was if she were channeling the minds, hearts and voices of these authors.

O’Connor’s works were particularly intriguing to me. There was a peculiar tone to her books that resonated: dark, terrible, and frightening, her words pierced through the bravado of a young man’s pretended nonchalance and veneer of savoir faire.

Knowing my love for all things Flannery, my friend Joseph Spiccia recently sent me a link to a review of the biography Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, by Brad Gooch. I immediately ordered the book. My habit is to research the life of authors whom I admire. I want to know what made them tick: why did they write as they did, choose the subjects they choose. Up until now, the only book that I found helpful in this regard was A Habit of Mind: The Letters of Flannery O’Connor. (If I had to choose only 5 books to keep in my library, this would be one of them.) Now, there is Gooch’s biography, which is incredibly insightful.

Even when it comes to theology and philosophy, I am as interested in the author’s life experiences as I am their academic assertions. As Frederick Buechner once said, “All theology is biography.” By this he meant that the writers’ theology told us as much about themselves as it did their theology … so I want to know the biography.

Who died and caused you to say this? What lost love moved you to have this notion of life and love? What crime did you commit, or think you committed, that motivated you to have your particular perceptions of Right and Wrong, Good and Evil, Truth and Error, Sin and Forgiveness? Why do you focus on moral failures and not on the human capacity for greatness, or vice versa? Who hurt you so terribly that it left this indelible imprint on your soul? What is it you think the Almighty did (or didn’t do) that led you to your perceptions of “God”? Where does your hope, despair, cynicism, faith, agnosticism come from?

Gooch’s book answers the kind of questions I ask myself, as I read O’Connor’s stories.

When Flannery was 15 years old, her father, Edward, died of lupus: he was 45 years old. Two years later, she wrote of that black day, “The reality of death has come upon us and a consciousness of the power of God has broken our complacency like a bullet in the side.”

Like a bullet in the side That perfectly describes what I experienced when I first read, A Good Man is Hard to Find.

When Flannery was 24-years old, she was diagnosed with lupus. The Doctors gave her 5 years to live. Over the next 15 years, living with her widowed mother in Milledgeville, GA, she wrote her stories in the shadow of her impending and inevitable death.

O’Connor’s novels, short stories and letters grapple with the battle between hard heads, hard hearts and an even “harder” divine grace.

“All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless, and brutal.”

“The stories are hard but they hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism … when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.”

Hard, but never morose: severe, but most always accompanied with a wit and humor that can dislocate a rib.

Samuel Johnson said, “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” O’Connor knew that she was going to die, and knew her “fortnight” was speeding toward her. She also knew why God had loved her into existence.

When she was doing her graduate work at University of Iowa, a friend asked why she worked so obsessively at her writing, and she replied that she “had to.” (Her friend, Barbara) “She was very serious about her mission in life, and had a sense of destiny.” Only a few years later, lupus honed this single-mindedness into a laser-like focus.

Upon reading a review of one of her books and discovering that the critic had mentioned her lupus, Flannery was livid, noting that her disease had no place in evaluating her work. Fair enough. True enough. However, the presence of the lupus did, with God’s grace, shape the soul of the author. Living and writing while “looking down the barrel of the Misfit’s shotgun,” give her stories a luminosity that very few writers ever attain.

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2009