A Late Encounter with the Enemy

Flannery O’Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925 and spent her early childhood in this well-known Southern city. The family moved to Milledgeville in 1938, where, except for the years spent at Iowa State University and a brief period in New York, O’Connor would spend the rest of her life. While O’Connor’s exploration of the South is clearest in her use of Southern Gothic tropes, other aspects of her life re-emerge in her work.

In Savannah, O’Connor’s family home stood opposite the St. John the Baptist Cathedral, where the author received her earliest formal education. She was a devout Roman Catholic throughout her life, and her work often explores themes related to her faith . In many of her stories, characters undergo epiphanies that reveal the error of their ways and prepare them for God’s grace in the afterlife. As André Bleikasten notes, in O’Connor’s fiction, “it is more often than not at the very last moment, at the climax of violence or at the point of death that grace manifests itself” (Bleikasten, André, “The Role of Grace in O’Connor’s Fiction.” In Jennifer A. Hurley (Ed.) Readings on Flannery O’Connor, Greenhaven Press, 2004). General Sash experiences such a moment of grace just before his death, and “the price paid for [his] spiritual rebirth is an immediate death” (Bleikasten, 2004).