In 1946 the director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, poet Paul Engle, interviewed a shy young woman with a Savannah, Ga., accent as thick as honey. Engle could hardly understand a word she said and asked her to respond in writing. On a legal pad, she wrote, “My name is Flannery O’Connor. Can I come to the writer’s workshop?”
After looking at samples of her work, he concluded, “Like Keats, who spoke Cockney but wrote the purest sounds in English, Flannery spoke a dialect beyond instant comprehension but on the page her prose was imaginative, tough, alive: just like Flannery herself.”
Fifty years ago today, Aug. 3, 1964, one of the great authors of the 20th century, Flannery O’Connor, died in Milledgeville, Ga., at the age of 39 after a 15-year battle with lupus, an autoimmune disease. Born and raised in Savannah, she spent all but five years of her life in Georgia.
O’Connor continues to be a treasure for those who take faith seriously.