Writers' Houses: Flannery O'Connor

Ann Napolitano, author of A Good Hard Look, which I read a couple years ago and wrote about, contributed recently to Writers' Houses. Her article, Where Flannery Became Flannery, is about her visit to O'Connor's childhood home in Savannah, Georgia, after visiting her farm in Milledgeville for seven years while working on her novel. Napolitano writes very well about the thrill you can get from visiting the place where an author got her start, either in life or as a writer. Take a look.

Two Georgia Writers Mentioned in Magazine

Two Georgia authors, Flannery O'Connor and Margaret Mitchell (so, two of my favorites as well) were both mentioned in an article in America Magazine about homes of Catholic authors. Take a look.

Author Readings by Faulkner and O'Connor

I love going to hear authors read from their books. I've recently found audio online of two of my favorite (deceased) authors reading from their works. Hear Flannery O'Connor read from "A Good Man is Hard to Find" (my favorite!) at Vanderbilt University in 1959. William Faulkner was writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia in 1957-58 and a website has a host of audio files from his classes, talks, speeches and readings. I particularly like hearing him read from The Sound and the Fury.

Author Reading: Ann Napolitano

Last night I went to a reading by Ann Napolitano, author of the brand-new book, A Good Hard Look, which has Flannery O'Connor as its central character. The event was sponsored by the Georgia Center for the Book and hosted by First Baptist Church in Decatur. Napolitano talked about her process while writing the book, which is something I'm always interested to hear more about. She discovered O'Connor while in college and read some of her work. Then, she put O'Connor's work away for about a decade before realizing that she needed to write a book about her. Until that point, she'd been working on a book that had Melvin Whiteson as a main character. The story took place in New York City and she said the plot wandered and wandered. She couldn't seem to make it work. She had an epiphany and knew she should stop working on that book and start writing one about O'Connor. The interesting thing she did, though, was bring Melvin over as a character in the new book to interact with O'Connor. Their relationship in A Good Hard Look is what the rest of the novel is built around. It took her seven years to write this book, and it sounds like she wrote hundreds and hundreds of pages that ultimately didn't make it into the final published version.

My favorite thing Napolitano said last night summed up O'Connor's fiction so well, and made me think of my fellow book clubber who was jarred by her short stories. The author said, "Flannery's fiction is abrasive. It knocks you around....You don't curl up with Flannery O'Connor." Indeed.

O'Connor Short Stories

I recently mentioned that my book club chose for June the Flannery O'Connor short story collection A Good Man is Hard to Find, which led to a spirited discussion. Short stories seemed just the right thing to read here at the beginning of summer when our next selection is Gone With the Wind (scheduled for August, and we also gave ourselves July off in preparation). Partly because of our June book selection, I have a particular interest in O'Connor at the moment. The other reason is because a fictional book about O'Connor's life in Milledgeville, Georgia, has just been published. It's called A Good Hard Look by Ann Napolitano. I read it last week. It fits in somewhat well with other fictional accounts of authors' lives I've been reading lately (see examples here and here). I quickly ordered the book online and read it to prepare for Napolitano's visit to the Atlanta area on her book tour next week. I'm anxious to hear what she has to say on her book and see if she talks about what is complete fiction in the book and what is made up with good, educated guesses on what O'Connor and Milledgeville were like in the 1960s. No matter how she speaks to these issues, it was a great read. I love a good book where characters are intertwined in surprising ways, and this book fits that bill for sure.

O'Connor's Hill House Restoration

A few months ago after a visit to Flannery O'Connor's farm, Andalusia, in Milledgeville, Ga., I wrote a post on the proposed restoration of the Hill House. This structure is on the farm behind the main home where O'Connor and her mother lived, and housed Jack and Louise Hill, caretakers of the farm, and a boarder. The home has been in sad disrepair, and in February Andalusia received grant funds to begin restoring it. It's the largest grant ever to be awarded to the farm. The project has begun (read about it here). I can't wait to go back for a visit and see the Hill House once it's back to its original self.

Speaking of O'Connor, my book club has chosen one of her short story collections, A Good Man is Hard to Find, for our June meeting. I'll be happily rereading these stories once my turn comes up for the book at my library.

Return to Andalusia

Last week I made a return visit to Andalusia, the final home of author Flannery O'Connor in Milledgeville, Georgia. I went last summer too (you can read about that here), and much progress has been made it little over a year.

First, an aviary has been built just behind the farmhouse for several peafowl. O'Connor raised the birds herself when she lived here, and a special project brought peafowl back to Andalusia. It's something the staff there are really excited about, and they keep the public updated on the birds and other things via their blog.

I spoke with Craig Amason, the director, who said the next project on the table is to save the Hill House, which was the home of the family who helped the O'Connors run the dairy farm at Andalusia. The Hills were mentioned in several of O'Connor's letters, published in The Habit of Being. Their house is thought to predate the main home where O'Connor lived with her mother. $75,000 is needed to stabilize the structure, and $200,000 is needed to fully restore the home. The Andalusia Foundation is working to raise the funds needed to make this house what it was when O'Connor lived here, as it was an important part of farm life at Andalusia. To learn more about how you can help, click here.

Inside the farmhouse, I got a picture of O'Connor's bedroom, one of the home's front rooms where she did her writing. Notice the crutches that she used as her lupus worsened.

After I left the farm, I visited the nearby campus of Georgia College and State University, where O'Connor was once a student and where some of her personal effects are on display. Here is the desk and typewriter where she did all of her work, which was, during her lifetime, in her bedroom at the farmhouse.

To read more about the College's O'Connor collection, click here.

Happy 85th birthday to Flannery O'Connor!

Tomorrow, Thursday, March 25, would have been Flannery O'Connor's 85th birthday. The folks at Andalusia, her home in Milledgeville, Georgia, will be celebrating in a big way. The mayor of Milledgeville will declare it "Flannery O'Connor Day" and visitors to the farm will be able to enjoy a peacock birthday cake. If you're able to make a visit there tomorrow, check out Andalusia's web site for directions and other information. To read about my visit to Andalusia and O'Connor's childhood home in Savannah last year, visit here and here.

I'm having my own celebration today by wearing a T-shirt I picked up at O'Connor's childhood home that says, "Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days." Indeed.

Peacocks and Prizes

According to Flannery O’Connor biographer Brad Gooch, the late writer identified with the nearly 40 peacocks she bought while living on her family’s farm. Gooch said in a CNN interview in 2009 that she “made an effort to make the peacock her own personal logo.” A peacock feather is part of the cover art on Gooch’s Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor published this year. A peacock and its feathers are also draped across the cover of my well-worn copy of The Complete Stories.

This summer when I visited Andalusia, O’Connor’s farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, the director of the historic site, Craig Amason, told me a secret. The farm would soon again be home to peacocks. I was excited to hear the news and promised not to let the cat out of the bag. The peacocks have now arrived. To read more about this, visit Andalusia’s blog.

While we’re on the topic, in case you haven’t heard, The Complete Stories, which won the National Book Award in 1972, beat out five other writers (including two of my other favorites, William Faulkner and Eudora Welty) to win Best of the National Book Award Winners. Read more about the National Book Foundation here.

The Gift of Reading from My Grandmother

I’ve talked quite a bit about my paternal grandmother, Dot, here, here and here in this blog. I can credit her more than anyone else with developing my love for books and reading. Over the years we’ve discussed book after book after book that we’ve both read.

She was diagnosed in September 2007 at age 82 with breast cancer and decided to fight it. She was the oldest patient her oncologist had ever had. She was a yellow dog democrat, and told her oncologist during one of their initial meetings that he needed to keep her alive long enough to see a democrat in the White House. He did. She managed to live with the breast cancer through both good days and bad days for more than two years. A year ago, she even felt good enough to have my father drive her from Greensboro, NC, to Atlanta to visit me for the weekend.

She was diagnosed with lung cancer on Tuesday, October 20 and died peacefully on Saturday, October 24. Even the day before she died we were talking Flannery O’Connor and looking through my Savannah pictures in her hospital room. She loved hearing about all the literary trips I’ve been taking this year, and she was thrilled that I was three weeks away from visiting Rowan Oak. If she had lived until I had gotten back from that trip, no doubt she would have wanted all the details and to have a look at the pictures.

The real kicker to all of this is that my maternal grandfather passed away less than four weeks before my grandmother, so my family had experienced two deaths almost at the same time. Though their children, my parents, married in 1974, my four grandparents had been close friends for years before that, and it was an added bonus to have their children marry each other. My grandfather and grandmother lived their last months on the same hall of an assisted living facility and died in hospital rooms next door to each other. Here is a picture of me with these two grandparents on my third birthday in 1981:

I have many, many pictures of me at all ages with all my grandparents, but for the purposes of this blog, here is one of my favorites with Dot on our Italy trip. We’re in Juliet’s Garden in Verona with her statue. That year it was my Christmas card photo.

For lack of a better place to mention this, and while I’m on the topic of the Italy trip, while we were in Rome, I visited the Keats-Shelley House just to the right of the Spanish Steps (my grandmother checked out the Steps instead while I went in the House). Here are a couple of photos from that, and here is an excerpt from my travel journal from that day (March 10, 2004):

“After lunch we visited the famous Spanish Steps and had some time on our own. I broke away from the rest of my group members to visit the Keats-Shelley House, a small museum dedicated to the British and American poets, novelists and artists of the Romantic period who spend time in Rome during the first half of the 19th century. I actually stood in the room where Keats died from consumption at the young age of 26. It was thrilling!”

So my excuse for nearly abandoning my blog for the month of October is, I hope, warranted. I have a lot in store for the blog in the next few months, so please keep reading.

Vote for your favorite National Book Award winner

The National Book Foundation has chosen 77 books over the past 60 years to win the prestigious National Book Award. To celebrate the organization’s 60th birthday, you can vote online for your favorite National Book Award winner from six finalists. The choices are:

John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever
Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man
William Faulkner, Collected Stories
Flannery O’Connor, The Complete Stories
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity Rainbow
Eudora Welty, The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty

To vote, click here before October 21.

To learn more about the National Book Foundation and its National Book Award, visit their web site.

Celebrating Banned Books Week

The American Library Association is celebrating Banned Books Week from September 26 to October 3. Most of my favorite books have either been banned or challenged at some time somewhere in the United States. Some of my banned book favorites include:

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (my all-time favorite)
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor
Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
My Antonia by Willa Cather

To learn more about Banned Books Week and to see a full list of challenged and banned classics, visit the ALA web site.

Which banned book is your favorite?

100 Best Beach Books Ever

Recently, over 16,000 people voted in National Public Radio's online poll, "100 Best Beach Books Ever." Today, they revealed the results. I've read 38 of the 100, and many that I haven't yet read are ones I'd like to read.

I've done a lot of beach reading myself and here are a few of my favorites:

Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor by Brad Gooch
A Painted House by John Grisham
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards
The Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer
Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman

Andalusia

As a follow up to Flannery O’Connor’s Childhood Home in Savannah, during my recent jaunt through Middle Georgia, I was most looking forward to visiting Andalusia, home to O’Connor for the last 13 years of her life, and where she wrote many of her most important works. O’Connor joined her mother at the farm in Milledgeville after being diagnosed with lupus, the disease that also took her father’s life. Living on the farm turned out to inspire many of the settings and characters in her novels and short stories.

Though she did take time out to eat lunch in town with her mother, attend church and social events, and give speeches, O’Connor focused a great deal of her time writing stories on her typewriter at her desk in her front parlor-turned bedroom. It’s almost like her diagnosis made her focus on what was most important, her writing. Aren’t we lucky because of that?


I was so struck by my surroundings that it was hard to imagine that O’Connor fought a terrible disease here. If it weren’t for her crutches propped up in her bedroom, I might have almost forgotten.

I think Alice Walker put it best when she described her visit to Andalusia in her essay, “Beyond the Peacock: The Reconstruction of Flannery O’Connor.” She wrote, “Standing there knocking on Flannery O’Connor’s door, I do not think of her illness, her magnificent work in spite of it; I think: it all comes back to houses. To how people live.”

Andalusia is still peaceful and beautiful today, all 544 acres of it. The first floor of the home has been left much like it was when O’Connor and her mother, Regina, lived there. There’s a wide screened in porch on the front of the house and trees that shade most of the yard. A conversation with the director indicated, though, that keeping up Andalusia is a financial struggle. Admission is free, though they appreciate a donation of $5 per adult. There is a small but nice gift shop. (I couldn’t resist buying the bumper sticker that said, “A Good Man is Hard to Find – Flannery O’Connor said it best”). If Andalusia isn’t in better financial shape soon, its governing foundation may have to start selling off some of the land to keep the house running. To find out more about how you can help, visit www.andalusiafarm.org.

Finding Alice Walker

In 1972, Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Color Purple and other works, came back to her home in Milledgeville, Georgia, for a visit. She, her parents, and her seven brothers and sisters had lived in this Middle Georgia town for about a year. Walker was born in nearby Eatonton and grew up there, minus the year in Milledgeville.

The Walker home in Milledgeville was just a short distance away from Andalusia, a dairy farm and home to novelist and short story writer Flannery O’Connor from 1951-64.

Walker enjoyed O’Connor’s fiction and the fiction of other American writers, but was frustrated that in her literature classes, she wasn’t learning the works of the African American writers who came before her.

Walker and her mother went by the site of their former home to find it rotting away. At Andalusia, Walker found O’Connor’s family home to be very much intact. Though vacant, a caretaker lived on the property. Walker described the experience in her essay, “Beyond the Peacock: The Reconstruction of Flannery O’Connor.” She wrote:

“My bitterness comes from a deeper source than my knowledge of the difference, historically, race has made in the lives of white and black artists. The fact that in Mississippi no one even remembers where Richard Wright lived, while Faulkner’s house is maintained by a black caretaker is painful, but not unbearable. What comes close to being unbearable is that I know how damaging to my own psyche such injustice is. In an unjust society the soul of the sensitive person is in danger of deformity from just such weights as this. For a long time I will feel Faulkner’s house, O’Connor’s house, crushing me. To fight back will require a certain amount of energy, energy better used doing something else.”

On a recent trip through Middle Georgia, I also tried to find Walker’s stomping ground. Eatonton’s Chamber of Commerce web site offers up an Alice Walker Driving Tour, with all stops being on Wards Chapel Road a few miles out from town.

The first stop was Wards Chapel A.M.E. Church, where Walker attended with her family and was baptized. Before I pulled up, I was envisioning it to be a nearly exact replica of the church in movie version of The Color Purple. Instead, I found a building in sad dilapidation, but with a sign out front announcing efforts to restore it.


Down the road were the sites of two homes, one where Walker was born and one where she grew up. Where she grew up had a structure that looked like a picnic shelter and gold panning set up than it did the home of a family of sharecroppers. No sign marked what it really is.

No house stood on the lot where she was born.

Years ago, Walker expressed anger at the disrepair of her former home, so I wonder what she thinks about her old home places now. Nearly four decades after she wrote “Beyond the Peacock,” signs mark the important places in her early life, but the same holds true for the buildings as during her visit in 1972. Unfortunately, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

If you’d like to contribute to the restoration of Wards Chapel A.M.E. Church, call 706-473-1781.

The Flannery O'Connor Childhood Home

“Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.” – Flannery O’Connor

I discovered Flannery O’Connor my junior year of college when I took Seminar of American Women Writers, which turned out to be one of my all-time favorite classes. No one captures the South or paints characters in exactly the same way O’Connor does. I still laugh out load nearly every time the grandmother and June Star open their mouths in “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” I feel a little ashamed of myself for being amused at the Bible salesman in “Good Country People.” I’m still stunned at the end of “Everything that Rises Must Converge” when, well, I won’t ruin the end for you. Just go read it if you haven’t already.

I think many writers spend their whole careers extracting memories and small bits of information from their lives, and in particular, their childhoods. So it was simply a must that I visit the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home on Lafayette Square in Savannah.

The tour includes two of the four floors of the house at 207 E. Charlton St. where O’Connor and her parents lived from 1925 to 1938. Most of the furniture was actually in the house while the O’Connors lived there. In the double parlor is the radio where O’Connor and her friends would gather on Saturday mornings to hear a radio show called, “Let’s Pretend.” I was not surprised to learn that she was such an imaginative child.

O’Connor really came to life for me while I walked through the house where she lived, played, and first began to create her own stories.

On the way back from Savannah, I began reading Brad Gooch’s new biography of O’Connor’s life, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor. So far, it’s excellent.