Mary Flannery O'Connor
Mary Flannery O'Connor, born in 1925 in Savannah Georgia, became one of the most respected fiction writers of the 20th century. Mary Flannery's early life was southern and Catholic, difficult and privileged. Her ability to know her mind at an early age helped her build an artistic reputation starting in high school. Through her fiction, Flannery went on to become a role model for unconventional girls everywhere and for anyone with dreams of becoming a writer.
Chapter 1
Young Mary Flannery stood for hours at her parents’ bedroom window. She had on the clunky supportive shoes, which she hated, so her mother wouldn’t pester her to wear them. And she wore her “leave-me-alone” look, as she called it, to keep anyone from bothering her. She wanted to stand there, to look and to listen. She had no idea that spending hours paying close attention to her world was the best preparation possible for becoming a writer.
Chapter 3
Mary Flannery also lived during the time of “Jim Crow” laws that required Black people to use separate water fountains and sit in the back of public buses…The look and feel of the Old South may have persisted longer in Savannah than elsewhere, because the city was one of the few in the South left undamaged after the Civil War… Mary Flannery disliked the sanitized and dishonest stories of the Old South told by sentimental books and movies of the time.
Epilogue
Flannery O’Connor continued speaking eloquently to her readers long after her death in the middle of the twentieth century. She never lost the peculiar, almost rude, and clearly southern voice of the teenager on a double date who said, “My dadgum foot’s gone to sleep…Flannery’s voice came from a lifetime of listening and watching the people around her and from her quirky interests, especially in birds, starting with the
amusing chickens and ducks of childhood and ending with the vain peacocks of Andalusia.