NOTE: Enjoy this excerpt from The American Daily Reader, by CatholicVote president Brian Burch and Emily Stimpson Chapman. To order the complete volume, visit the CatholicVote store today!
When visitors arrived at the small farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, a host of rare birds came out to greet them—mostly peacocks, but also ostriches, emus, toucans, and more. None of the birds, though, were as rare as their owner, the celebrated writer Flannery O’Connor.
O’Connor had retreated to the farm, Andalusia, in 1951, after she began showing signs of the same form of lupus that killed her father 10 years earlier. She was 15 at the time of her father’s death, an only child living with her parents in Savannah.
After losing her father, O’Connor earned her bachelor’s degree at the Georgia State College for Women and her master’s degree through the University of Iowa’s renowned Writers’ Workshop program.
From there, she went to Yaddo—an artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York—and afterward to the Connecticut home of poet Robert Fitzgerald and his wife Sally, all the while working on her first novel, Wise Blood.
Once she fell ill, however, O’Connor left Connecticut for Georgia. She believed her budding literary career was over before it began. But she was wrong. Her career wasn’t over. It just unfolded differently.
Back in Georgia, rather than living broadly, O’Connor instead lived deeply, embracing a quiet life of suffering and prayer, study and work. A faithful Catholic living in what she described as the “Christ-haunted” Protestant South, O’Connor’s writing drew on the mystery of her Catholic faith and the manners of her Southern culture. That combination produced tales of startling grace and even more startling redemption.
Each story, in its own way, depicted the soul’s struggle with what O’Connor called “the stinking mad shadow of Jesus.” Each also reflected its author’s sharp wit and keen intelligence. Those tales were crafted slowly, with O’Connor working only a few hours a day to conserve her strength. Yet by the time of her death, on August 3, 1964, she produced one of the 20th century’s most honored bodies of work, including two novels, 32 short stories, plus over a hundred book reviews, essays, and talks.
