Flannery O’Connor at 99

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture

Available on-demand

Step into the complex world of Flannery O’Connor. You will find rare archival treasures, encounter profound insights on race and faith, and absorb scholarly revelations behind her provocative fiction. Witness leading experts illuminate her artistic evolution, fulfilling your desire for accessible literary depth while preparing for her upcoming 2025 centenary celebration.

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Panel Context & Scholarly Landscape

Hosted by the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture, the panel “FC24: Flannery O’Connor at 99” offered a comprehensive examination of O’Connor’s enduring footprint as her March 25, 2025 centenary approaches. Chair Angela Alaimo O’Donnell opened by detailing the immense volume of existing scholarship—over 100 critical books and biographies, 1,725 articles and essays, 2,189 foreign language studies, and thousands of graduate theses—a canon far exceeding that of comparable peers like Eudora Welty. O’Donnell highlighted a major critical shift: while early post-mortem scholarship following O’Connor’s 1964 death concentrated on craft, genre, Southern identity, and traditional Catholic themes of grace and sacramentality, contemporary scholarship engages modern lenses. Today, researchers critically analyze O’Connor through disability studies (reflecting her 14-year battle with lupus), embodiment, politics, eco-criticism, cultural studies, and her radical ambivalence regarding race and civil rights.

Archival Discoveries & Childhood Underground Springs

Amy Alznauer presented findings from her research into O’Connor’s juvenilia housed across Emory University and Georgia College. Drawing on O’Connor’s essay The Grotesque in Southern Fiction, Alznauer emphasized the necessity of descending into artistic underground springs to locate the origins of vision. These springs formed in childhood sites like the Klein Mansion attic on Green Street in Milledgeville—where O’Connor established an early art studio at age 13—and in school records documenting her early writing, quail raising, and speech needs. Alznauer tracked O’Connor’s artistic obsessions, such as persistent childhood drawings of hats from age five onward, which later evolved into central symbolic devices in mature masterpieces like Everything That Rises Must Converge. Crucially, Alznauer identified 1941 as a tragic watershed: witnessing her beloved father waste away and die from lupus when she was fifteen shattered her world (“lost a century today”), establishing an artistic furnace where traumatic disruption yields wonder above grief. This experience directly birthed early creative efforts, including her hand-wound wire booklet Herman the Goose (1941)—where a pet goose unexpectedly lays an egg, serving as O’Connor’s primary symbol of concrete reality yielding transcendent truth. Furthermore, unpublished Iowa stories like frizzly chicken and white girl reveal an early, acute awareness of racial othering and playground power dynamics rooted in her Southern youth.

Archival Ephemera & New York Connections

Kathryn Laborde detailed her research into O’Connor’s personal artifacts, including five handwritten address books, correspondence with her mother Regina and friend Maryat Lee, and Regina’s 1958 travel diary from their pilgrimage to Lourdes. Laborde re-evaluated O’Connor’s relationship with the mid-century New York publishing establishment. Although Esquire magazine placed O’Connor at the red hot center of the literary scene in 1963, and friends frequently urged her to relocate north, O’Connor consistently declined, preferring farm life at Andalusia in Georgia. Laborde noted how Regina’s travel diary vividly documents the grueling physical reality of O’Connor navigating European train platforms, stairways, and airports on crutches long before the Americans with Disabilities Act. Ephemera within the address books also revealed eccentric personal contacts, ranging from local Milledgeville vaudevillian Edgar Moran and Andy Warhol associate Dudley Huer (who asked to draw O’Connor’s portrait, though she insisted he sketch her bird instead) to Fred Darcy, an escaped asylum patient turned correspondent, and writer Letty Rogers.

Canonization, Adaptation, and Centenary Stewardship

Farrell O’Gorman addressed O’Connor’s standing within the broader American canon, tracing her lineage directly to Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Mark Twain. He emphasized her wide artistic influence across non-Catholic and secular contemporary figures, including Toni Morrison, George Saunders, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Tobias Wolff, and Bruce Springsteen (whose seminal album Nebraska was directly inspired by O’Connor’s dark vision of sin and redemption). Serving as co-trustee of O’Connor’s literary estate, O’Gorman outlined major initiatives for the 2025 Centenary. These include an international conference in London, theatrical stagings of Revelation by dramatist Karin Coonrod (filmed in Rome for educational release), the public display of previously unreleased personal framed oil paintings at the Andalusia Interpretive Center, and the acquisition of the Green Street home by Georgia College. O’Gorman also highlighted the ongoing cataloging of 110 newly opened family archive boxes containing 200 personal library volumes—including O’Connor’s personal, heavily annotated copy of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.

How has the academic focus on Flannery O’Connor shifted from her death in 1964 to the present day?
Scholarship has transitioned from early post-mortem analyses focused on literary craft, Southern regionalism, Catholic theology, and sacramentality to contemporary inquiries examining disability, embodiment, eco-criticism, political context, and O’Connor’s radical ambivalence concerning race during the Civil Rights era.

What role do Flannery O’Connor’s childhood artifacts and juvenilia play in understanding her mature fiction?
Childhood artifacts—including her Green Street attic studio, obsessive sketches of hats, hand-wound wire stories like Herman the Goose, and unpublished Iowa stories like frizzly chicken and white girl—represent the foundational underground springs of her vision. Deeply rooted in the traumatic loss of her father in 1941, these early works expose foundational explorations of grief, concrete sacramental symbolism, and racial othering.

What was Flannery O’Connor’s actual relationship with the mid-century New York literary establishment?
Although O’Connor maintained necessary professional contacts with New York agents and editors, archival address books and letters reveal she consistently rejected invitations to settle in or socialize within New York literary circles, deliberately choosing to live and write at Andalusia in Georgia.

Why is Flannery O’Connor considered central to the broader American literary canon?
Positioned alongside historic American authors like Poe, Hawthorne, and Twain, O’Connor’s intense vision and technical mastery have profoundly shaped a diverse spectrum of contemporary writers, filmmakers, and musicians, spanning from classic influences to modern masters such as Toni Morrison, George Saunders, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, and Bruce Springsteen.

How is the Flannery O’Connor Centenary being celebrated by her estate and scholars in 2025?
Centenary initiatives include an international scholarly conference in London, theatrical adaptations by Karin Coonrod, public exhibitions of her personal framed oil paintings at the Andalusia Interpretive Center, the acquisition of her Green Street home, and the archival cataloging of 110 newly opened family collection boxes containing personal library volumes such as her annotated copy of Moby Dick.

“People ask the question well is it possible to have racist thoughts and tendencies and write stories that are anti-racist and the and the answer is yes.” – Angela Alaimo O’Donnell
“The reason we’re coming to O’Connor still…. is because we’re seekers and I think the impulse behind being an artist and being a scholar is the same one that we are trying to find a way to go forward.” – Amy Alznauer
“And when we connect these dots we are flushing out the person that we are studying.” – Kathryn Laborde
“For somebody who lived such a short life who was was able to produce such a small body of work she can be placed at the center of the American literary cannon.” – Farrell O’Gorman
“Flannery didn’t like to travel when she was alive but we make her travel we take her internationally to various places around the world.” – Farrell O’Gorman