Posted on 05/30/2015 9:21:41 AM PDT by NKP_Vet
Washington D.C., May 30, 2015 / 06:01 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Award-winning American author and devout Roman Catholic Flannery O’Connor will appear on a new postage stamp this summer, the U.S. postal service announced last week. The stamp is decorated with peacock feathers, a tribute to the family peacock farm in Georgia where O’Connor did much of her writing.
Famous for her Southern Gothic fiction style, O’Connor’s best-known works include her first novel, "Wise Blood", and many short stories such as “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” A collection of her works, "The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor," won the 1972 National Book Award for fiction and was named the Best of the National Book Awards, 1950-2008 by a public vote.
The author was born in 1925, the only child to devout Roman Catholic parents living in the heart of the Protestant “Bible Belt” in Savannah, Georgia. O’Connor went to school at Georgia State College for Women, then to the Iowa Writers Workshop, and finally to New York to study and work on her writing.
However, at the age of 25, a diagnosis of lupus forced O’Connor to return home to her family’s farm in Andalusia, Georgia, where she lived out her days caring for animals, going to church, and writing.
Her inclusion on U.S. postage stamps is a triumph for both American authors and American Catholics, said Ralph Wood, professor of literature and theology at Baylor University and author of the 2005 book “Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South.”
“More than 50 years after her early death in 1964 (at age 39), her fiction continues to command worldwide attention, and so the USPS rightly adds her to its roll-call of writers who have been thus honored,” Wood told CNA in an e-mail interview.
“Yet it would be tempting on such a public occasion to ignore the religious nature of Flannery O’Connor’s achievement,” Wood added.
But this can hardly be done. O’Connor never kept her faith a secret, and despite her frail health would travel to speak about faith and literature.
The recent release of her college prayer journal, which she kept while attending the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in her early 20s, provides even more evidence that the author’s deep interior life and relationship with God drove her passion for writing.
“Dear God please help me to be an artist, please let it lead to You," she wrote.
“In those years O'Connor came to recognize her own significant talent, but also came to worry that her powerful desire for literary success – a success that seemed to be within her reach – might threaten her relationship with God,” said Professor John Grammar, director of the Sewanee School of Letters.
“How to harmonize her desire to write well with her desire to love God completely? Writing had to become an avenue to God, not an end in itself,” he added. Throughout the journal, O’Connor increasingly writes about seeing her talent as a vocation, rather than a career path to success.
What further makes O’Connor stand out from other writers, and particularly other writers of faith, is her willingness to write about the dark and grotesque: her constant use of unsavory characters and horrific plots is almost unheard of in other Christian writings.
“The distinctive thing about O’Connor as a Christian artist is that she has little interest in making us feel good,” Grammar said. “In her work the love of God is always present, but far from being comforting, it is guaranteed to disrupt comfort and shake up complacent certainties, in her characters and her readers.”
Indeed, O’Connor herself said she was uninterested in making people feel comfortable and happy, as Brad Gooch explains in his biography "Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor."
"O'Connor said that modern writers must often tell 'perverse' stories to 'shock' a morally blind world. 'It requires considerable courage,' she concluded, 'not to turn away from the story-teller,'" he wrote.
American Catholics can learn something from O’Connor, whose relevance continues today despite her unwillingness to compromise or water down her beliefs in her work.
“Beset with its own failings, the Church is also besieged with demands for accommodation of its basic doctrines and practices to the secular spirit of the age,” Wood said.
“Flannery O’Connor rejected all such compromises. Her fiction endures because it provides a living artistic alternative to the twin evils of modernity: the omni-competent nation-state and the all-pervasive Culture of Death. Whatever the motives prompting it, this commemorative stamp contains the image of the nation’s most redemptive writer: Flannery O’Connor.”
The Flannery O'Connor stamp is a "forever" stamp for 3-ounce packages and will be available June 5.
She is quite interesting.
She can’t really be understood w/o the Catholicism.
He work is in large part lampooning or otherwise making fun of southern Protestantism.
She also liked the Peacocks.
Will the Irish branch of the Gay Lobby approve or disapprove of this honor? Time will tell. It shouldn’t matter, but has been allowed to matter.
She was a courageous, great artist. One of my favorites.
“She knew she could never be a saint, but thought perhaps she could be a martyr, if they killed her quick.”
“The author was born in 1925, the only child to devout Roman Catholic parents living in the heart of the Protestant “Bible Belt” in Savannah, Georgia. O’Connor went to school at Georgia State College for Women, then to the Iowa Writers Workshop, and finally to New York to study and work on her writing.”
Author should have researched Savannah better. There is a LARGE Catholic community here, and has been for many years. There is a reason the 2nd largest St. Patrick’s Day parade in America is here, other than the partying.
O’Connor’s house here is a museum. Every year on her birthday there is a reading of her work there. Wish they wouldn’t do it on days I have to work.
A great writer. True, you cannot really understand her work unless you perceive her Catholic background and assumptions, but she handles it very subtly.
Not an easy, casual read. But in my opinion she is the best American novelist, indeed the only really great one, to appear since since the Second World War.
You might compare her to Evelyn Waugh. Their styles are very different, but they are both Catholic novelists who hide their Catholicism from non-believers and enjoy telling jokes when they are most serious.
“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it”. ~ Flannery O’Connor
“She would have been a good woman,” the Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
Agreed. O’Connor came out of an Irish Catholic “ghetto” in the “Old South,” parochial schools and all.
I've been reading, struggling with, and rethinking Flannery O'Connor for years, and I know her "Gothic" style isn't for many. Consider the huge paradoxes in her stories.
The most "grotesque" figures, who are Christ-haunted and by turns Christ-fanatical and Christophobic, turn out to be right on the key point because they take God seriously. They know God is real and that they have to be either His prophet or His enemy.
My favorite one in this category is Mrs. Turpin from "Revelation." She thinks incessantly about her level in the social order in their small rural community, and considers herself above most other people. Then she is physically attacked (!!) by Mary Grace (MARY GRACE!!!) in the doctor's office waiting room, and later has a revelation stemming from Mary Grace's yelling at her that she is "an old wart hog." She realizes she "is" an old wart hog, or rather, that her status doesn't mean anything, and that God is bringing her "social inferiors" into heaven by His inexplicable grace. That is her "Revelation."
The more "sophisticated" people in her stories--- the humanists, do-gooders, teachers, social workers --- turn out in the end to be clueless and shallow (like Sheppard in "The Lame Shall Enter First"). They don't fight for God, and they don't fight against Him. So in the end, they don't make any contact with the core realities of life, good and evil. They don't receive any revelation unless their disappointment with life turns out to be revelatory.
I won't go on. Like I said, her writing is so ironic, it's definitely not for every taste. But don't judge that she is making fun of Protestants. That is a million miles from her intent.
“Wise Blood” is also very good.
**The Flannery O’Connor stamp is a “forever” stamp for 3-ounce packages and will be available June 5.**
I only purchase “Forever” stamps. I will ask for this.
"The Holy Church of Christ Without Christ: where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way."
Thanks for your nice post on O’Conner.
I appreciate it.
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