March 25, 2025 — When I first proposed the idea of leading a Jesuit Media Lab seminar on Flannery O’Connor’s short stories for Lent, Mike Jordan Laskey was enthusiastic about the idea, and quipped that it would probably fill quickly, since “Catholics love Flannery O’Connor.” Still, though, we were surprised when all the spots were taken within minutes. We decided to offer a second section, on a different day, and that too filled almost immediately. I don’t doubt that if there was time to lead it, we could’ve filled a third course on her work. One reason for this, I think, is that there is a hunger for deep, sustained engagement with well-crafted stories and for the connections that can come from discussing challenging and meaningful ideas in community.
But it is not surprising that it was these specific courses on O’Connor that were the fastest-filling Jesuit Media Lab offerings. Flannery O’Connor was born 100 years ago today, and she has, perhaps, never been more popular. All of her short stories (in a variety of formats), and both of her novels are still in print, alongside “Mystery and Manners” (a collection of her essays) and “The Habit of Being” (her collected letters); one can even read the prayer journal she kept while beginning her writing career, a book of the cartoons she drew when young, and “Why Do the Heathen Rage,” a look at the fragments of the novel she was working on when she died.
She has also been the subject of recent films: last year saw the release of “Wildcat,” a critically acclaimed biopic, directed by Ethan Hawke and starring his daughter Maya in the role of Flannery; and in 2021, the documentary “Flannery” won the inaugural Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film. In academic circles, she remains one of the most discussed American writers of the 20th century, and among scholars of Catholic literature and culture her work is indispensable. If one attends any of the biennial Conferences on the Catholic Imagination, it is immediately clear how beloved and influential her work continues to be.
And with good reason!
Flannery O’Connor is one of America’s greatest writers. She is a master of the short story; no one blends humor and violence better than she. No one writes more movingly, and persuasively, about the surprising and disruptive presence of grace. Her letters are funny and insightful; her prayer journal is deeply moving; “Mystery and Manners” contains some of the best writing ever about Catholic literature, and no one is better at explicating O’Connor’s stories than O’Connor herself. Today marks the centenary of her birth, but her work remains powerful and relevant.
Her biography is quickly summarized. She lived most of her life in Georgia (she was born in Savannah but lived the majority of her life in Milledgeville); she was devoutly Catholic, a daily communicant who regularly read Catholic theologians and philosophers; and she suffered from lupus, a disease which killed her father when she was 15 and took her life when she was only 39. O’Connor certainly drew on aspects of her life in her fiction — in her talk “The Nature and Aim of Fiction” she claimed, “The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days” — but her work transcends her biography. Her true “subject in fiction,” as she so succinctly stated, “is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.”
One reason her work remains relevant — even for non-believers — is that her depictions of this devil-held territory are so sharp, and funny, and grounded in memorable details. She offers both spiritual wisdom and social critique, and the two are wedded to each other. Most of her characters think they are good people, or are at least living righteously, but they are blind to their own flaws, to their failures of love and charity and humility. Her characters are usually racists and classists (though in some memorable instances they are what we might now call anti-racists), but in either case O’Connor uses sharp irony to demonstrate the limits of these characters’ worldviews. Time after time, O’Connor uses moments of shocking violence to shake the characters out of their self-satisfied complacency. She is quite clear about why she does this: “I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moments of grace.”
She was under no illusions about how her work would be understood (or misunderstood). Although she believed that “every great drama naturally involves the salvation or loss of the soul,” she knew that her readers would not see the world as she did. She wrote, “I have found that what I write is read by an audience which puts little stock either in grace or the devil.” This is one reason her stories are often so extreme and grotesque: “When you can assume your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock — to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”
One reason her work remains relevant — even for non-believers — is that her depictions of this devil-held territory are so sharp, and funny, and grounded in memorable details. She offers both spiritual wisdom and social critique, and the two are wedded to each other.
In 2025, most of the reading public (what is left of it) still seems to put little stock in the movement of grace, and even less in the presence of the devil, but O’Connor’s startling figures still have the power to shock us. One thing I love about teaching O’Connor, whether it is to traditional undergrads, or adult learners returning to college to finish their degrees, or a Jesuit Media Lab cohort, is that the stories retain their power to unsettle us.
In most of my classes there will be at least one student who looks up a story online, to figure out what it is all about and how it “works.” They can offer the standard critical interpretation of why, say, Manley Pointer steals Hulga’s artificial leg in “Good Country People,” and even what the leg symbolizes; but even so, once we get to really talking about how the story affects us, it is clear that O’Connor’s work resists being “solved” in this way. It remains disturbing and leaves us with lingering questions and unresolved feelings. And this sense of confusion and unease can, ultimately, lead us to our own experience of grace.
To that end, I will leave you with a few recommendations. People often ask me where to start with O’Connor, and while there are no real wrong answers to that question, here are a few potential places to begin:
Non-fiction:
- If you are primarily interested in explicitly religious writing, start with her prayer journal. Written as she was just beginning her career, it combines vulnerability and ambition with a profound spirituality.
- If you prefer memoirs/ non-fiction, “The King of the Birds,” included in “Mystery and Manners,” gives a good sense of O’Connor’s humor and is her most autobiographical essay.
Fiction:
- “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is O’Connor’s most frequently anthologized story and is a classic for a reason. The first half is an amusing road trip story; the second half is a bloodbath. But as O’Connor tells us, “In this story you should be on the lookout for such things as the action of grace in the Grandmother’s soul, and not for the dead bodies.”
- “The Displaced Person,” about the arrival of a family of war refugees on a mid-century Southern farm, and the disruption this causes to all involved, is O’Connor’s longest short story. It is also a timely reminder that conflicts about immigration, and the weaponization of Christianity as a rationale for exclusionary behavior, are nothing new.
- If you prefer longer form fiction, her first novel, “Wise Blood,” is one of the great American novels about loneliness and spiritual longing. It is deeply strange, but also, at times, very funny.
- “Revelation,” one of the last stories O’Connor wrote, is my personal favorite. It is about the violent encounter between the self-satisfied Ruby Turpin and the angry college student Mary Grace and its lingering aftermath. It is a masterpiece.