Written by Richard Thorman
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VOICE ONE:
I'm Shirley Griffith.
VOICE TWO:
And I'm Ray Freeman with the VOA Special English program, People in America.
Today, we tell about writer Flannery O’Connor.
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VOICE ONE:
Flannery O'Connor
Late in her life someone asked the American writer Flannery O’Connor why she
wrote. She said, "Because I am good at it. "
She was good. Yet, she was not always as good a writer as she became. She
improved because she listened to others. She changed her stories. She re-wrote
them, then re-wrote them again, always working to improve what she was
creating.
Flannery had always wanted to be a writer. After she graduated from Georgia
State College for women, she asked to be accepted at a writing program at the
State University of Iowa. The head of the school found it difficult to
understand her southern speech. He asked her to write what she wanted. Then he
asked to see some examples of her work.
He saw immediately that the writing was full of imagination and bright with
knowledge, like Flannery O’Connor herself.
VOICE TWO:
Mary Flannery O’Connor was born March twenty-fifth, nineteen twenty-five, in
the southern city of Savannah, Georgia.
The year she was born, her father developed a rare disease called lupus. He
died of the disease in nineteen forty-one. By that time the family was living
in the small southern town of Milledgeville, Georgia, in a house owned by
Flannery's mother.
Life in a small town in the American South was what O’Connor knew best. Yet
she said, "If you know who you are, you can go anywhere. "
VOICE ONE:
Many people in the town of Milledgeville thought she was different from other
girls. She was kind to everyone, but she seemed to stand to one side of what
was happening, as if she wanted to see it better. Her mother was her example.
Her mother said, "I was brought up to be nice to everyone and not to tell my
business to anyone. "
Flannery also did not talk about herself. But in her writing a silent and
distant anger explodes from the quiet surface of her stories. Some see her as
a Roman Catholic religious writer. They see her anger as the search to save
her moral being through her belief in Jesus Christ. Others do not deny her
Roman Catholic religious beliefs. Yet they see her not writing about things,
but presenting the things themselves.
VOICE TWO:
When she left the writing program at Iowa State University she was invited to
join a group of writers at the Yaddo writers' colony. Yaddo is at Saratoga
Springs in New York state. It provides a small group of writers with a home
and a place to work for a short time.
The following year, nineteen forty-nine, she moved to New York City. She soon
left the city and lived with her friend Robert Fitzgerald and his family in
the northeastern state of Connecticut. Fitzgerald says O’Connor needed to be
alone to work during the day. And she needed her friends to talk to when her
work was done.
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VOICE ONE:
While writing her first novel, “Wise Blood”, she was stricken with the
disease, lupus, that had killed her father. The treatment for lupus weakened
her. She moved back to Georgia and lived the rest of her life with her mother
on a farm outside Milledgeville. O’Connor was still able to write, travel,
and give speeches.
“Wise Blood” appeared in nineteen fifty-two. Both it and O’Connor's second
novel, “The Violent Bear it Away,” are about a young man growing up. In both
books the young men are unwilling to accept the work they were most fit to do.
Like all of Flannery O’Connor's writing, the book is filled with humor, even
when her meaning is serious. It shows the mix of a traditional world with a
modern world. It also shows a battle of ideas expressed in the simple, country
talk that O’Connor knew very well.
VOICE TWO:
In “Wise Blood”, a young man, Hazel Motes, leaves the Army but finds his
home town empty. He flees to a city, looking for "a place to be.” On the
train, he announces that he does not believe in Jesus Christ. He says, "I
wouldn't even if he existed. Even if he was on this train. "
