A Perennial Kind of Service: Flannery O’Connor, Protégé and Mentor

Flannery O’Connor stands among the great authors of the second half of the twentieth century, with a canon of literary work—two novels and a National Book Award-winning collection of stories, along with essays, speeches, letters, and journals—that belies her limited years. If her life had been longer, she would have completed a greater body of work, but she also might have affected the development of creative writing pedagogy in the United States. O’Connor, after all, was one of the most successful of the early graduates of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the first and most prestigious graduate program for creative writers. Holding a newly minted degree, a prestigious fellowship, and a book contract in hand, she might have been invited to teach at many of the creative writing programs emerging in the years after her graduation[1]; however, convincing her to become part of the overwhelming enterprise of the American university would have been difficult. As a student, she found the content of her creative writing “classes where students criticize each other’s manuscripts … equal parts of ignorance, flattery and spite” (MM 86), at best, and, writing to her mother, she once characterized the criticism as “violent” (Dear Regina 28). [1] I imagine O’Connor teaching at her undergraduate alma mater, Georgia State College for Women, where, had she not suffered an untimely death due to lupus, she could have had a front row seat to the integration of the American South. In the summer of 1964, as O’Connor was dying, the first Black student, Cellestine Hill, was admitted to the college. O’Connor described herself “an integrationist by principle & a segregationist by taste,” and further comments written to friend Maryat Lee in May 1864 about James Baldwin, other Black leaders, and the Black community have rightly generated a vigorous scholarly conversation about O’Connor and race. For more on these issues, see Paul Elie’s 2020 New Yorker article “How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?” and Angela Alaimo O'Donnell’s book Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O'Connor.