The Life You Save May Be Your Own
by Flannery O'Connor
Dear classics readers,
Tomorrow – Tuesday 25 March – would have been the American writer Flannery O’Connor’s 100th birthday. She was born on 25 March 1925, in Savannah, Georgia.
O’Connor wrote brilliant, astringent, unforgettable stories about bigoted, broken, sad, violent characters who populate a landscape of dusty roads, lonely gas stations, fiery churches and scrubby farms. She defined what we now think of as ‘Southern Gothic’.
To mark her centenary, why not read one of her remarkable short stories? I recommend my five favourites below.
First, here’s a little about Flannery O’Connor herself.
She was the only child of Catholic parents, an outsider amidst the Reformed Protestantism of the southern United States. After earning her degree at the Georgia State College for Women, she took the University of Iowa’s writing program, and her first published story, ‘The Geranium’, was written while she was still a student.
After university, she moved to New York where she continued to write. She published her first novel, Wise Blood, in 1952. That same year she learned she was dying of lupus, a disease which had afflicted her father. For the rest of her life, she and her mother lived on the family dairy farm, Andalusia, outside Milledgeville, Georgia.
For pleasure she raised peacocks, pheasants, swans, geese, chickens and Muscovy ducks. She was a good amateur painter. She published a short story collection and one more novel before she died at the age of 39.
These five Flannery O’Connor stories are my personal favourites:
A Good Man is Hard to Find (1953)
A family road trip goes disastrously awry when they follow the grandmother’s whim and turn off the main road.
The River (1953)
A neglected boy misunderstands a charismatic preacher and goes to seek baptism in the big river.
The Life You Save May Be Your Own (1955)
An elderly mother persuades a charming one-armed tramp to marry her mentally handicapped daughter.
Good Country People (1955)
An intellectually frustrated, one-legged farmer’s daughter is attracted to a lanky Bible salesman, who takes her to a hay loft.
Everything That Rises Must Converge (1961)
An aspiring writer becomes increasingly exasperated when his bigoted mother encounters her black alter ego on the bus.
All of these stories are in the volume of O’Connor’s Complete Stories, published by Faber and Faber in the UK and Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US. Her Complete Stories won the National Book Award posthumously in 1972. In 2009 it was awarded the Best of the National Book Awards by America’s National Book Foundation.
Faber and Faber will be publishing a centenary selection of O’Connor’s short stories later this year, selected and introduced by the bestselling novelist Lauren Groff. Watch this space!
Buy a copy of Flannery O’Connor’s Complete Stories through Bookshop.org (UK) or Bookshop.org (US) and Read the Classics will earn a commission from your purchase. Thank you in advance for your support!
You might also be interested to watch the 2023 biopic Wildcat about O’Connor’s life. It was co-written and directed by Ethan Hawke and stars his daughter Maya Hawke. Here’s the viewing information for the US. (Unfortunately it’s not available to stream in the UK.)
The film is named after the O’Connor short story ‘Wildcat’, about an old African American man, afraid of being attacked by a wildcat that is prowling the local area.
On the subject of 100th anniversaries, next month, on 10 April, it will be exactly 100 years since The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald was first published by Scribner’s in New York.
To mark the occasion, on Thursday 3 April we will be discussing The Great Gatsby at the monthly classics book club I host at Hatchards, the oldest bookshop in the UK. If you can get to London, you’d be very welcome to join us!
The details are here. Tickets are £5 if you have a free Hatchards Reward Card.
A reminder that if you’re reading along with Anna Karenina we’ll be discussing the March instalment this coming Friday. If you haven’t finished this month’s instalment yet, you have a very dramatic scene in store . . .
And finally, I send recommendations and round-ups like this on Mondays. If you’d prefer not to receive these emails – but you would like to receive our read-along messages – follow this link to your settings. Under Notifications slide the toggle next to ‘Read the Classics with Henry Eliot’. A grey toggle means you will not receive those emails.
I grew up down the road from Flannery O'Connor's homeplace. A field trip was a must, and we started reading her stories in eighth grade. They were shocking and unforgettable -- the first stories I ever read without a happy ending. She opened my world up to what literature could be. I've been afraid to watch "Wildcat," but then I remind myself how much I loved John Huston's "Wise Blood." (John Huston scouted a lot of locations around me, but sadly he didn't choose our farm. But he chose several around us, and he'd spend early mornings visiting with my friends' parents in their kitchens while the crew set up, drinking coffee with them as casually as if he were getting ready for a day of plowing alongside them.)
In Canada and the US it’s also on Kanopy, a free streaming service that’s available through your library membership.
One of her stories (you may be able to guess which…) is also the kick-off for “American Fiction”, a great adaptation of Percival Everett’s “Erasure”.