Flannery O'Connor

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Flannery O'Connor, portrait photo 1947

Mary Flannery O'Connor (born March 25, 1925 in Savannah , Georgia , † August 3, 1964 in Baldwin County , Georgia) was an American writer .

biography

Flannery O'Connor was the only child of Edward F. O'Connor and Regina Cline O'Connor. In 1937, her father was diagnosed with lupus erythematosus . He died on February 1, 1941 when Flannery was 15 years old. Lupus was common in the O'Connor family. Flannery O'Connor was devastated and almost never spoke of him again in her later life.

O'Connor described himself as an "only child with pigeon toes and a receding chin and a leave-me-alone-or-I'll-bite-you complex." When O'Connor was five years old, she taught a chicken to walk backwards. That was the first time she got to know what it is like to be famous. The Pathé News folks used their trained chickens in Little Mary O'Connor and showed the film across the country. She said, “That was the most exciting thing that ever happened to me. Since then it has only been downhill. "

O'Connor attended Peabody Laboratory School, where she graduated in 1942. Then she went to Georgia State College for Women , where she studied English and sociology (the latter was a perspective she satirically processed in her novel The Violent Bear It Away ). In 1946, Flannery O'Connor was inducted into the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop .

In 1949, O'Connor met Robert Fitzgerald and eventually accepted an invitation to stay with him and his wife Sally in Redding, Connecticut.

In 1951 she was also diagnosed with lupus erythematosus. She then returned to her ancestral Andalusia farmhouse in Milledgeville . The doctors only gave her five years; in fact, she lived for almost 15 years. In Andalusia she kept around 100 Asian peacocks . Fascinated by birds of all kinds, she raised ducks, chickens, geese, and all kinds of exotic birds she could get. She often included pictures of peacocks in her books. She describes her peacocks in an essay entitled "The King of Birds". Despite their sheltered lives, their writings show an uncanny understanding of all the nuances of human behavior. She was a very devout Catholic, although she lived in the predominantly Protestant southern American states. She collected books on Catholic theology and sometimes gave lectures on faith and literature, traveling extensively in spite of her fragile health. In 1958 she traveled to Lourdes and Rome, where she was supported by Pope Pius XII. was blessed. O'Connor corresponded with many people, including such famous writers as Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop . She never married, she was satisfied with her correspondents and the close relationship with her mother.

O'Connor completed over two dozen short stories and two novels while suffering from lupus. She died on August 3, 1964, aged 39, of complications from lupus in Baldwin County Hospital and was buried in Milledgeville, Georgia. Regina Cline O'Connor outlived her daughter by many years; she died in 1997.

Works

O'Connor wrote two novels and 31 short stories, as well as a number of book reviews and commentaries. She was a southern writer in the manner of William Faulkner , writing in a Southern Gothic style, emphasizing regional settings and, as is often said, grotesque characters. She said "everything that comes from the south is always called grotesque by readers from the north, unless it is really grotesque, then it is called realistic" ( Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose 40 ). Your lyrics are often set in the south; they revolve around morally questionable characters while the racial issue looms in the background. One of their trademarks is the not very subtle hint of the future, so that the reader suspects something long before it really happens. Furthermore, each of her works has a disturbing and ironic ending.

Her two novels were Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960). She also published two short story books: A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (published in 1965 after her death).

Being a devout Catholic all her life, her scriptures are profoundly religious and influenced by Thomas Aquinas ' idea that the world is determined by God. Yet she did not write an apologetic fiction such as was prevalent in contemporary Catholic literature. She was of the opinion that it must be clear from the literature what the author wanted to say without a pedagogical index finger. She wrote ironic, refined allegorical literature about seemingly backward characters from the South, mostly fundamentalist Protestants, whose characters change in such a way that they come closer to Catholic thought. The transformation is often brought about by pain, violence and ridiculous behavior in the search for the sacred. However grotesque the circumstances, she tries to portray her characters as if they were touched by divine grace. This precluded a sentimental understanding of the violence in their stories, as well as their own illness. O'Connor wrote, "Grace changes us and change is painful." She also had a sense of bitter humor, often based on the mismatch between her characters' limited perceptions and the dire fate that awaits them. Another source of their humor can often be found in well-meaning liberals trying to get along with the rural south in their own way. O'Connor uses their characters' inability to cope with racism, poverty and fundamentalism (except in sentimental illusions) as an example of the failure of the secular world in the twentieth century.

Various stories show that O'Connor was familiar with the most delicate contemporary issues that their liberal or fundamentalist figures were confronted with. She delved into the Holocaust in her famous story, The Displaced Person, and racial integration in Everything that Rises Must Converge . In O'Connor's work, racial problems became more and more important as she neared the end of her life. Her last story is called Judgment Day , a drastically altered version of her very first story called The Geranium .

For more than a decade, her best friend, Betty Hester, received a letter from O'Connor every week. It is primarily these letters that make up the correspondence collected in The Habit of Being , a selection of O'Connor's letters edited by Sally Fitzgerald. The public-shy Hester was given the pseudonym "A." and her identity was only revealed when she committed suicide in 1998 at the age of 75. Much of O'Connor's best-known writings on religion, writing, and the South are contained in these and other letters. The complete set of the two unedited letters was published by Emory University on May 12, 2007; the letters were handed over to the university in 1987 on condition that they would not be published until after 20 years. Betty was a lesbian, so Emorys Steve Enniss speculates that for this reason she wanted to hide the letters from the public. The revealed letters contain not exactly flattering remarks about O'Connor's friend William Sessions and the works of other Southern writers.

Although Flannery O'Connor did not leave behind a very extensive oeuvre in her relatively short creative phase, she is, alongside Katherine Anne Porter , Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers, counted among the most important storytellers of the southern states in American literary history who succeed Faulkner . In an unusual way, as a emphatically Catholic narrator, she received almost unreserved recognition from critics who did not share her theological or religious views.

The Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction , named in honor of O'Connor, is an award given each year for an outstanding collection of short stories.

Works (selection)

Works in German translations

  • A circle in fire , hardback 1961, transferred from Elisabeth Schnack , Claassen Verlag
  • Das Brennende Wort , Roman (original title: The Violent Bear It Away ) hardcover Munich 1962, translated by Leonore Germann, Hanser Verlag
  • A circle in fire , paperback 1967, Rowohlt Verlag
  • A heart of fire , Roman (Original title: The Violent Bear It Away ) Benziger Verlag, 1972
  • The wisdom of blood : Roman (original title: Wise Blood ), hardcover, Rogner & Bernhard 1982, translated by Eva Bornemann
  • Do the violence , novel (Original title: The Violent Bear It Away ) paperback, Diogenes Verlag , 1987
  • The lame will be the first : Stories, paperback, Diogenes Verlag, 1987 (with an introduction by Robert Fitzgerald)

Collections of short stories

  • At the abyss of death - The best murder stories , Margot Drewes (selection), Mosaik Verlag Hamburg o. J.
  • American narrator. From F.Scott Fitzgerald to William Goyen. Edited and translated by Elisabeth Schnack, Zurich 1957, Manesse Verlag
  • Excursions. Tales of our time. Edited and translated by Leonore Germann, Munich 1964, Hanser Verlag
  • Modern storytellers in East and West. 1966, Goldmann's Yellow Paperback Books
  • Modern American prose. Edited and translated by Hans Petersen, Berlin (GDR) 1967, Volk und Welt publishing house
  • The tree with the bitter figs. Stories from the south of the USA. Selected and transferred by Elisabeth Schnack, Zurich, Diogenes 1979
  • No one can still be trusted. Stories. Translated from American English by Anna Leube and Dietrich Leube. Arche Literatur Verlag, Zurich-Hamburg 2018, ISBN 978-3-7160-2769-1 .

Original works:

  • Wise Blood , 1952
  • The Life You Save May Be Your Own , 1953
  • A Good Man is Hard to Find , 1955
  • The Violent Bear It Away , 1960
  • A Memoir of Mary Ann (editor and author of the introduction), 1962
  • Everything That Rises Must Converge , 1965
  • Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose , edited by Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald, 1969
  • The Habit of Being: Letters , edited by Sally Fitzgerald, 1979
  • The Presence of Grace and Other Book Reviews , edited by Carter W. Martin, 1983

Unfinished works:

  • There are fragments of an unfinished novel with the provisional title Why Do the Heathen Rage? (Why Are the Pagans Angry?) Using material from some of their short stories such as "Why Do the Heathen Rage?" "The Enduring Chill", and "The Partridge Festival".

Film adaptations

Literature (chronological)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See André Bleikasten: Flannery O'Connor . In: Martin Christadler (ed.): American literature of the present in individual representations. Kröner Verlag, Stuttgart 1972, ISBN 3-520-41201-2 , pp. 352-370, here p. 369.
  2. ↑ See Franz Link: Flannery O'Connor . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 - Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn u. a. 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , pp. 22-34, here p. 22, and André Bleikasten: Flannery O'Connor . In: Martin Christadler (ed.): American literature of the present in individual representations. Kröner Verlag, Stuttgart 1972, ISBN 3-520-41201-2 , pp. 352-370, here p. 352.
  3. ↑ Manuela Reichart : Flannery O'Connor: "No human soul can still be trusted" - Dark stories from narrow-minded America , deutschlandfunkkultur.de, February 20, 2018, accessed on July 2, 2018
personal data
SURNAME O'Connor, Flannery
ALTERNATIVE NAMES O'Connor, Mary Flannery (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH March 25, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH Savannah (Georgia)
DATE OF DEATH 3rd August 1964
Place of death Baldwin County, Georgia