Flannery O'Connor is Unfinished

The incomplete story of America's greatest Christian writer

*This post was released a year ago in honor of my book that was published in January 2024 (Flannery O’Connor’s Why do the Heathen Rage?). Republished in honor of O’Connor’s 100th Birthday!

If you have only recently heard of Flannery O’Connor, then likely your knowledge of her has more to do with the tensions regarding race in her biography than with the genius of her fiction or the strength of her Catholic faith.

In 2020 the publication of Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor instigated a New Yorker article by Paul Elie that exploits a handful of quotes from her previously unpublished correspondence with the inflammatory headline, “How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?” Scholars of O’Connor lit up the internet with their responses (including yours truly), but my favorite was by Amy Alznauer, author of The Strange Birds of Flannery O’Connor, who writes,

What surprised me was [Elie’s] minimization or omission of so many of the people who have written on O’Connor and race. …Maybe it shouldn’t surprise me that much of the work he misreads or flat-out ignores has largely been done by women and Black Americans. 

A more balanced reading of Flannery O’Connor’s life and legacy is called for. There is a way to enjoy her comedy, be compelled by her vision of truth, and laud the beauty of her prose without overlooking the problems of her letters. We don’t have to excuse O’Connor as a product of her time; rather we should accept her limitations as the reality of her humanness while simultaneously receiving her art with gratitude for the way it points beyond itself.

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My forthcoming book Flannery O’Connor’s Why do the Heathen Rage? seeks to show readers her unfinished novel, fragments of scenes that I edited from the nearly 400 pages she left behind. In this novel, O’Connor was tackling questions about race in her segregated world, not letting herself off the hook in the process. The cover stresses that the novel is unfinished because O’Connor died only a few years into writing it, and thus this book is a look “at a work in progress.”

While there are ethical debates about publishing posthumous work, the more pressing question here may be, why publish an unfinished story? For O’Connor specifically, I argue that this book is needed to understand O’Connor more fully. By seeing the author as a work in progress herself, we may read with the charity that all great fiction demands of us. I’d also suggest that all writers should be seen as in progress. We are each homo viator. When a book is presented to readers, it appears as a finished product. Yet, nothing is really completed on this side of eternity. Ourselves and our art is on its way.

Recently a woman who resides in the basement of O’Connor’s childhood home in Savannah has unearthed more details about O’Connor’s life than previous biographers had been aware—the untold story of O’Connor nanny Emma Jackson. Searching through records at the Georgia Historical Society, the 1930 U.S. census and other archives, Carolyn McCoy has puzzled together the hazy portrait of this woman whose life deserves its own novel.

McCoy rightly insists that Jackson’s story should remain her own, not be relegated to a detail in O’Connor’s narrative. Keeping that in mind, all of our stories also affect one another, and Jackson’s life played a role in O’Connor’s formation. From O’Connor’s juvenilia, a story titled “Frizzly Chicken” shows us a glimpse of Emma Jackson. From this story, McCoy sees O’Connor “transforming the identity of whiteness…into an assortment of moral and spiritual failures. But I did not have to squint to see, alternatively, a southern writer too fluent in native ideologies to have escaped them.”

While McCoy’s assessment of O’Connor’s story from her youth is likely accurate, we should see this story as where O’Connor began, whereas her unfinished novel shows us how she was continuing to mature in her thinking. In other great writers who lived longer than O’Connor, we observe the development of their thought. For instance, we don’t judge Dostoevsky primarily by Poor Folk (1846), his first novel, penned when he was in his early twenties and which showcases his penchant for socialism. His final novel The Brothers Karamazov (1880), published when Dostoevsky was nearing sixty years old, disavows any good found in the socialist system. And, if we only knew of Dostoevksy’s fiction prior to when he was 39 (the age at which O’Connor died), we in the twenty-first century likely never would have known of him at all!

If we look at how Emma Jackson surfaces in the work of O’Connor, we see why the author portrayed race as a social construct in her short story “The Artificial N—.” Her mother Regina had to teach the young Flannery how to imagine a hierarchy according to race, for the child assumed not only that Emma was equal to her but actually that she preferred aspects of Emma’s world to her own. What was taught to Flannery could be untaught as well. “Total non-retention,” O’Connor once quipped, “has kept my education from being a burden to me.” The author wrote with the aspiration to enlighten readers’ imaginations, showing them that the ways of the world did not have to reign over the ways of their heart.

In Why do the Heathen Rage? O’Connor wanted to reform a white Southern intellectual from his limited perspective on race by fostering a deep friendship—perhaps even love interest—with a civil rights activist from the North. The idea for the novel is about all we get in the pages that O’Connor left behind. She was regularly sketching out the two characters, grappling with their own childhoods, their families and their differing worlds of North and South. It seems like O’Connor wanted to figure out how such diverse viewpoints on race would be formed and then interact. In the start of this story, O’Connor questions her own assumptions as well as those of her contemporaries.

When I read O’Connor’s unfinished pages, I longed to finish her story. I wanted to bring the two different characters together and have them startle and shock one another into goodness. I wanted the Flannery-esque protagonist Walter Tilman to be converted from his racism into a holy fool for Christ. “Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve done,” writes Bryan Stevenson, the author of Just Mercy. I believe that Stevenson is right. Our mercy should extend not only to those about whom Stevenson writes, criminals on death row, but also to the authors we admire whose biographies may disappoint us. We don’t gloss over the faults of O’Connor, but we should forgive her, just as we too desire to be forgiven.

"Wilson does a great service in resurrecting one of O'Connor's lesser-known works."

--Publishers Weekly

Paradoxically, it is O’Connor who taught me this charity through her work. I started reading O’Connor when I was fifteen years old. The first story I encountered was “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.” At the conclusion of the story (spoiler alert), a man whose pride and selfishness compelled him to abandon a mentally handicapped young girl on the side of the road calls out to the Lord, “Break forth and wash the slime from this earth!” Anyone who reads this story should be scared of this mock prayer, for we recognize the man himself as the slimiest. This realization points back to the reader herself, “I too am the slimiest,” or in the words of St. Paul, “the chief of sinners.” If we cast stones, we must be prepared for the barrage of rocks to break back upon us.

I’m grateful for all that I have learned from Flannery O’Connor’s work. Because she was such a genius and gifted by God with certain visions of his truth that were prophetic, I continue learning from her after twenty-five years of reading her fiction. As I put forth this book with so many pages of O’Connor’s unpublished material, I may be merely indulging in my desire that she would have given us more to read. I can only fantasize about the greatness of this unfinished book and all the many books that O’Connor could have written had not lupus claimed her life before her fortieth birthday. The reality is, we won’t have more books by Flannery O’Connor. But this unfinished work should do more than satisfy our fantasies. I hope it encourages us all to be charitable readers, writers, and neighbors. I expect that we still have more to learn, as we continue on our way.

More on Flannery O’Connor

• Books on Flannery O’Connor (there are too many to list here, but here are the top 7 that come to mind….)

  • Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South by Ralph Wood, his new book on Flannery O’Connor will come out with Baylor UP next year

  • A Subversive Gospel by Michael Mears Bruner

  • Essays on O’Connor from In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens by Alice Walker

  • Christina Bieber Lake’s The Incarnational Art of Flannery O’Connor

  • Toni Morrison’s The Origin of Others

  • Understanding the Hillbilly Thomist by Fr. Damian Ference

  • Jonathan Rogers’ The Terrible Speed of Mercy

• Videos on Flannery O’Connor

  • A talk I gave on Why do the Heathen Rage? at the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture in September 2020

  • A series of introductory videos to O’Connor’s work on my YouTube

  • “Pivotal Players” by Bishop Barron on Flannery O’Connor

  • PBS Documentary “Flannery”

• Literature with Flannery as a character:

  • Frances and Bernard by Carlene Bauer, an epistolary novel that imitates Flannery’s voice as a character

  • A Good Hard Look, a novel by Oprah-book club winner Ann Napolitano, takes place in Milledgeville, where Flannery is finishing a novel

  • Andalusian Hours, sonnets written in Flannery’s voice by poet Angela Alaimo O’Donnell

  • The Red Wolf: A Dream of Flannery O’Connor by R.T. Smith, a poetry collection

  • The Book of Hulga, poems inspired by Flannery by Rita Mae Reese

  • “Wildcat” a biopic about Flannery O’Connor’s life by Ethan Hawke