2011 Student Writing Awards Booklet - Santa Fe Community College

Academic Essay Winner
Shari Brown
Flannery O’Connor: Religion and Faith in
“A Good Man is Hard to Find”
Flannery O'Connor is by definition a Southern writer and by
admission a devout Catholic. Her brief life and relatively small body of
work are riddled with Christian tenets, yet she manages to avoid saturating
her writing in religious dogma. In her short story,“A Good Man is Hard
to Find”, O'Connor seamlessly blends themes ubiquitous in all her work:
comedy, religion, and faith to create a stark and gruesome reality. Even still,
her writing manages to satisfy both literary critics and the religious community
alike. Flannery O’Connor’s abiding voice ensures that she will
remain an unprecedented and truly unclassifiable writer.
Born March 25, 1925 to a long line of southern Roman
Catholics, Mary Flannery O’Connor attended grammar through high
school in traditional Catholic learning institutions.When Flannery was
twelve, the O’Connor family relocated briefly from their hometown of
Savannah, Georgia to Atlanta, and finally to Milledgeville. Not long after
their move, Flannery’s father was diagnosed with lupus and died shortly
after. Flannery O’Connor attended the Georgia College for Women, where
she wrote for and later edited the college newspaper, The Corinthian. She
also contributed satiric cartoons for The Colonnade, another college paper
(Balée 24). Upon graduating, O’Connor went on to attend Iowa State’s
prestigious Writer’s Workshop. After spending a short time at Yaddo, an
artist’s colony in New York, and then with friends in Connecticut,
O’Connor was diagnosed with lupus, the same disease that killed her
father. Forced back South, Flannery O’Connor spent her remaining years
on the family farm, Andalusia, in Milledgeville with her mother. Her writing
continued to flourish until her death on August 3, 1964.
O’Connor repeatedly dismissed herself as an intellectual. She
would even advise her friends to be wary of such “interleckchules,” as she
called them. In a correspondence to a fellow writer, Granville Hicks, she
wrote,“I’m not an intellectual and have a horror of making an idiot of
myself with abstract statements and theories” (Coles 111). She had an aversion
towards the “thinking people” of the day. Critics that over-analyzed
the natural and metaphysical world, as well as her writings, often overlooked
the real underpinnings in her work. In a letter to her friend she
wrote,“I do hope that you will get over the kind of thinking that sees in
every door handle a phallic symbol and that ascribes such intentions to
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