Flannery O’Connor Wanted to Shake Her Readers Awake. Her Family Wanted Her to Write the Next ‘Gone With the Wind’
This year marks the writer’s 100th birthday. Through fiction anchored in her Southern background and Catholic faith, O’Connor revealed how candid confrontations with darkness lead to moments of reckoning
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When the film Gone With the Wind debuted in 1939, an extravagant premiere gala unfolded over three days in downtown Atlanta. Thousands gathered outside Loew’s Grand Theater, which had been decorated to resemble a Southern plantation home, to watch the stars arrive. Four Confederate veterans in uniform were presented to thunderous applause. The crowds saw the sweeping romantic drama, based on Margaret Mitchell’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1936 novel, as their story. But just a few hours southeast of the city lived a 14-year-old named Flannery O’Connor, who thought the spectacle was ridiculous.
O’Connor loathed the historical epic, though she and Mitchell had a lot in common. Both were raised by Irish Catholic families in Georgia, where Catholics were seen as outsiders by the Protestant majority, and both drew on their roots in their fiction. The similarities ended there. O’Connor rejected literature driven by nostalgia and sentimentality, qualities that she felt defined Mitchell’s work.
When she was 20, O’Connor enrolled in the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she began forging her own literary legacy. But back in Georgia, her family didn’t understand the life she was building. She wanted to become a serious writer. Her mother, Regina Cline O’Connor, wanted her to write the next Gone With the Wind.
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“She was not a Southern belle. She revolted. She just thought this was crazy,” says Mark Bosco, a literary scholar who co-wrote and co-produced the 2019 documentary Flannery. “She didn’t want to write romance. She didn’t want to write nostalgia—but she wanted to play with nostalgia.”
More than a decade after Gone With the Wind’s silver screen debut, O’Connor published a story satirizing the gala’s pageantry. “A Late Encounter With the Enemy” follows a 104-year-old veteran who can’t quite recall his Civil War service, though he vividly remembers “that preemy they had in Atlanta,” where he had appeared in uniform before cheering crowds. “It was a nashnul event and they had me in it—up onto the stage,” the man says. He later performs a similar ornamental function at his granddaughter’s graduation, where, unnoticed by the young boy charged with pushing his wheelchair, he dies. The story ends with the child waiting, “with the corpse, in the long line at the Coca-Cola machine.”
March 25, 2025, would have been O’Connor’s 100th birthday. As the many events and exhibitions surrounding her centenary attest, interest in the author’s work has only deepened since her death in 1964 at age 39. In recent years, scholars have published her prayer journal and her unfinished novel; her life has been the subject of the award-winning documentary Flannery and a star-studded 2023 biographical drama. Her influence on American culture is unparalleled: O’Connor’s stories have inspired writers such as Cormac McCarthy, Alice Munro, Alice McDermott and George Saunders; musicians like Bruce Springsteen, Lucinda Williams, Sufjan Stevens and Josh Ritter; and filmmakers like the Coen brothers and Quentin Tarantino.
Even so, O’Connor’s works have never enjoyed Gone With the Wind’s widespread popularity. When adjusted for inflation, the screen adaptation still reigns as the highest-grossing film of all time. In surveys, the novel consistently ranks among America’s favorite books, sometimes second only to the Bible.
Mitchell famously closes her historical epic on a hopeful note: “After all, tomorrow is another day.” O’Connor, in contrast, never hints at a brighter tomorrow. Her approach has always alienated a contingent of readers, though she believed they were missing the point. For O’Connor, cultivating an unflinching engagement with reality was always a hopeful pursuit.
“People are always complaining that the modern novelist has no hope and that the picture he paints of the world is unbearable,” she wrote in an essay titled “The Nature and Aim of Fiction.” “The only answer to this is that people without hope do not write novels. … I’m always highly irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it’s very shocking to the system.”
From a young age, O’Connor had strong literary preferences, which she expressed in brief, scathing reviews inside the covers of her books. In her copy of Alice in Wonderland, she scrawled, “Awful. I wouldn’t read this book.” She eviscerated a novel called Georgina Finds Herself, describing it as the worst book she had ever read “next to Pinocchio.” Her review of Pinocchio? “This is absolutely the worst book I have ever read. Don’t read it.”
As a writer, her proclivities were similar. She relished in the unusual and the mysterious, arguing that the ability to understand good fiction belonged only to the “kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.”
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For O’Connor, sentimentality and moralism were formidable enemies of mystery. She condemned fiction that trafficked in such manipulative techniques—particularly when those works, like Gone With the Wind, hit close to home. In a 1963 essay titled “The Regional Writer,” O’Connor insisted that “Southern identity is not really connected with mockingbirds and beaten biscuits and white columns any more than it is with hookworm and bare feet and muddy clay roads.” The romanticized vision of the South was at odds with her experience of living in it.
O’Connor has always been classified as a Southern writer, a label that she accepted with caveats. She refused to seek success by generating nostalgia for a mythologized past, instead sketching masterful portraits of the people she observed around her, in all their flaws and contradictions. In “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” a woman boasts that her family once owned “a plantation and 200 slaves.” “Revelation,” meanwhile, features a character who “occupied herself at night naming the classes of people.” And “Good Country People” depicts a traveling Bible salesman who insists that “the word of God ought to be in every room in the house” and laments the lack of “real honest people” before stealing a woman’s prosthetic leg.
These stories aren’t meant to be taken literally. As O’Connor herself noted, in the real South, “escaped criminals do not roam the roads exterminating families, nor [do] Bible salesmen prowl about looking for girls with wooden legs.” She saw herself as an acute observer of the “grotesque,” heightened, shocking moments that may not occur every day but nevertheless convey fundamental truths about the world—especially the Southern and Catholic worlds she knew best.
“Flannery saw in Catholicism and in her Southern culture a strong inclination to avoid honesty,” says Bruce Gentry, editor of the Flannery O’Connor Review at Georgia College & State University. “Her own unflinching honesty was a reaction against the extremities of Catholic piety and Southern niceness. She might not have gone so far with her honesty if she weren’t inclined to fix the groups she belonged to.”
O’Connor’s stories often end in violent, horrifying moments of reckoning: A young boy drowns in the river in which he was recently baptized. A woman prays, “Oh Jesus, stab me in the heart,” before she gets mauled by a bull. An escaped convict shoots a grandmother three times in the chest after experiencing a fleeting moment of connection.
But for O’Connor, who was a devout Catholic, violence served a distinct purpose: It cultivated a moment of awareness that led to grace or redemption. “I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace,” she said in a 1963 speech at Hollins College in Virginia. “Their heads are so hard that almost nothing else will do the work.”
O’Connor believed that redemption often came “at considerable cost,” an idea that’s “implicit in the Christian view of the world.” As such, her characters can’t reach their moments of reckoning on their own. Instead, they need a push. They need to be shaken awake. O’Connor’s job was to do the shaking.
She wanted her readers, along with her characters, to experience such awakenings. In “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” she imagines a woman who reads only to improve her mind—a futile endeavor, as “she’ll never know whether her mind is improved or not, but should she ever, by some mistake, read a great novel, she’ll know mighty well that something is happening to her.”
What exactly did O’Connor want to happen? She never attempted to evangelize or lecture on church doctrine—though at least one of Bosco’s students converted to Catholicism after reading her stories. Instead, she understood that most of her readers weren’t religious and had little understanding of the concept of grace. She wanted them to experience “how grace works in the modern consciousness,” says Bosco.
But readers, even religious ones, didn’t always understand what O’Connor was trying to do. “I got a real ugly letter from a Boston lady about that story called ‘A Temple of the Holy Ghost,’” she wrote to novelist Robie Macauley in 1955. “She said she was a Catholic and so she couldn’t understand how anybody could even HAVE such thoughts.”
O’Connor couldn’t understand how any Catholic could avoid such thoughts. Nevertheless, she knew that many other religious writers relied on avoidance, as if their faith somehow excused them “from the obligation to penetrate concrete reality,” as she said in a 1963 lecture. These writers, no matter how well-intentioned, were “trying to reflect God with what amounts to a practical untruth,” she argued in an essay.
Instead, they resorted to sentimentality, which O’Connor dismissed as “a distortion of sentiment, usually in the direction of an overemphasis on innocence.” Under Catholic doctrine, humanity lost its innocence in the fall of man, and it can only return to it through redemption. O’Connor insisted that sentimentality was “a skipping of this process” and “an early arrival at a mock state of innocence.” Humanity can’t achieve redemption without engaging with darkness.
O’Connor would later read the writings of Carl Jung, and she saw parallels between the Swiss psychiatrist’s ideas and Catholic teachings. Jung argued that individuals must confront their own subconscious evil in order to effectively manage it. But because these confrontations are usually painful, many resist them. For O’Connor, “Violence is necessary to overcome the defensiveness of the conscious mind,” says Gentry.
Just before the murderer, called the Misfit, kills the grandmother at the end of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” both characters experience such a moment. After fruitless pleading fails to sway the murderer, the grandmother has a sudden realization. “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” she says. The Misfit, startled by this intimate declaration, shoots her in the chest. “She would of been a good woman,” says the Misfit, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
“Am I trying to shock with God?” O’Connor wrote in her prayer journal. “Am I trying to push Him in there violently, feet foremost? Maybe that’s all right. Maybe if I’m doing it it’s all right?”
The burgeoning author kept the journal when she was in her early 20s, and many of her entries fell into two categories: She wanted to be a good writer, and she wanted to feel closer to God. Sometimes, these two prayers appeared to be connected. “Dear God, please help me be an artist,” she wrote, “please let it lead to You.”
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O’Connor often asked for guidance in deepening her faith. In one entry, she wrote, “I am afraid of pain and I suppose that is what we have to have to get grace. Give me the courage to stand the pain to get the grace.” In 1947, she wrote that she felt “too mediocre now to suffer. If suffering came to me I would not even recognize it.”
Suffering came to O’Connor three years later. In the winter of 1950, she boarded a train from New York City, where she had moved after graduate school, back home to Andalusia, the family farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she planned to spend the holidays. Sally Fitzgerald, a friend who saw her off that day, later recalled that she looked “much as usual, except that I remember a kind of stiffness in her gait.” During the long train ride, O’Connor fell ill, and when she arrived, her Uncle Louis said she looked like “a shriveled old woman.” Doctors told her mother, Regina, that she was dying of lupus.
The same disease had killed O’Connor’s father a decade earlier, when she was 15. Regina worried that her daughter wouldn’t be able to handle the knowledge of a similar death sentence. For more than a year, she kept the diagnosis secret, instead telling O’Connor that she had rheumatoid arthritis. O’Connor, who believed so deeply in honest appraisals of reality, learned the truth in the summer of 1952. “I now know that it is lupus,” she wrote in a letter soon after, “and am very glad to so know.”
O’Connor’s literary career was just beginning. She had already published several early stories in magazines, and she planned to resume her work up north when her health improved. But after learning the true nature of her illness, she resigned herself to a longer stay. She received steroid drugs that hadn’t been available during her father’s time, though they caused debilitating side effects, which left her on crutches. Every morning, she worked on her stories for several hours, stopping only when her energy waned in the afternoon.
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O’Connor lived in Milledgeville until she died, at age 39, in 1964. During those 13 years, she wrote all of her best work, including more than two dozen stories, many of which were published in her seminal collections A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965).
“The lupus vocalized and intensified her imagination, and her stories are what they are because she was a person struggling with lupus,” says Bosco. “She knew that she was working under the clouds of possible death.”
During her final years, O’Connor received occasional visitors from her literary life, such as her publisher, Robert Giroux. One morning over breakfast, her mother asked him, “Mr. Giroux, can’t you get Flannery to write about nice people?”
He started to laugh. But when he looked at O’Connor, she wasn’t laughing with him. She didn’t find her mother’s comment amusing.
Giroux later described O’Connor’s circumstances to Robert Lowell, her friend and mentor, who recorded his secondhand account in a letter to the poet Elizabeth Bishop. “Her life is what you might guess,” Lowell wrote. “A small, managing indomitable mother, complaining that no one helps her, more or less detesting Flannery’s work.”
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O’Connor loved her mother, but she was also “exasperated by her,” says Bosco. While Regina may not have understood her daughter’s fiction, she supported it—perhaps in more ways than O’Connor ever realized. Many of the writer’s stories feature characters who bear a striking resemblance to her mother, who “looms large in all of her work and her imagination,” Bosco adds. “Regina is … more than all those other women,” but O’Connor wasn’t going to let good material go to waste.
She also used her stories to scrutinize her own shortcomings. In “Good Country People,” Hulga, the character with a wooden leg, lives with her mother—though she has “made it plain” that if it weren’t for her limited mobility, she would be at a university “lecturing to people who knew what she was talking about.” In “The Enduring Chill,” Asbury, an aspiring writer in New York City, falls ill while visiting his mother in the South. He fancies himself her intellectual superior, though he never seems to get much writing done. Meanwhile, his mother hopes he is working on “a very long book” and offers unsolicited suggestions as to its contents.
“When you get well, I think it would be nice if you wrote a book about down here,” she tells him. “We need another good book like Gone With the Wind.”
