After leaving Connecticut, O'Connor settled into life at her mother's dairy farm, Andalusia. She wrote all morning and spent the rest of the day on correspondence and other activities, like tending to her chickens and peacocks.
Old habits die hard.
In 1952, her novel Wise Blood was published. The book told the story of a spiritually bankrupt veteran-turned-preacher Hazel Motes, and a self-declared prophet named Enoch Emery. It was a parade of the grotesque, featuring a mummified corpse, a gorilla costume, and people blinded with lye.
Okay, so that all seems tame compared to the horrifying Human Centipede days we live in, but trust us...it was intense back then.
The book shocked readers and critics. Wise Blood "introduces its author as a writer of power," the New York Times wrote. "There is in Flannery O'Connor a fierceness of literary gesture, an angriness of observation."9 O'Connor had officially arrived as one of America's most talented young writers, and America's only talented young writer/peacock farmer.
O'Connor was able to support her writing career through numerous awards and fellowships. The year after Wise Blood's publication, she received the Kenyon Review fellowship. In 1955, she won the first of three O. Henry Prizes for outstanding short fiction. She also published a short story collection entitled A Good Man Is Hard to Find.
Some readers were scared off by O'Connor's work. T.S. Eliot said that he was "quite horrified" by O'Connor's stories. "She has certainly an uncanny talent of a high order but my nerves are just not strong enough to take much of a disturbance,"10 the poet stated. O'Connor was undeterred, and also probably like, "toughen up, you wimp!" Her characters, she said proudly, were "freaks and folks."11
In 1959, she was awarded a Ford Foundation grant. She published her second novel, The Violent Bear It Away, the following year. The title of the novel was taken from a Bible verse in the book of Matthew, and the novel dealt explicitly in religious themes. O'Connor maintained that all of her work was Christian-oriented, but critics usually were like, "lol wat."
...In more polished, critic-like jargon, of course.
As her obituary put it, "Miss O'Connor saw herself as 'a novelist with Christian concerns' who wrote her stories 'in relation to the redemption of Christ.' Many readers failed to see this relation, but they enjoyed her nevertheless."12
O'Connor often viewed her own work differently than others did. She balked at comparisons between her and Carson McCullers, a contemporary and fellow Southern Gothic writer. Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams made her "plumb sick," and she didn't care much for Kafka, to whom she was also compared.13
It's rumored that McCullers, Capote, Williams, and Kafka are still weeping in their graves.
She preferred to think of herself as literary kin to Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose Twice Told Tales and other Gothic stories mirrored her own view of the world.
It's rumored Hawthorne is still fist-pumping in his grave.
Despite her illness, O'Connor traveled occasionally to lecture or read from her work. She didn't date. Only one man was known to have courted O'Connor, and after they shared a kiss, he described it as so: "as our lips touched, I had a feeling that her mouth lacked resilience, as if she had no muscle tension in her mouth, a result being that my own lips touched her teeth rather than lips, and this gave me an unhappy feeling of a sort of memento mori, and so the kissing stopped. . . . I had a feeling of kissing a skeleton, and in that sense it was a shocking experience."14
We have a feeling the bon mot "don't kiss and tell" was invented because of this delightful over-sharer.
Seriously, dude. If you don't have anything nice to say, don't go into a detailed explanation of what it's like to mack on a living bone bag.
Toothy, skeletal kisses aside, O'Connor had many friends, correspondents, and birds, and was never wanting for company. She received another O. Henry Prize in 1963, was working on a third novel, and was constantly thinking up new ways to scare the snot out of T.S. Eliot.
We would've suggested donning a gorilla mask and leaping out of his closet when he least expected it...but that's just us.