Her Chicken Walked Backwards!!!

Mary Flannery O Connor, American novelist and one of the best short story writers of 20 th century, brought to words the rural American South.

Born on March 25, 1925 in Savannah, Georgia, USA, O’Connor was a child prodigy. She began with contributing to school publications. Growing up, however, she faced hardships—particularly after losing her father as a teenager. Her first short story, ‘The Geranium’ appeared in 1946; she was then studying at the University of Iowa.

Religious themes dominated her works. Her first novel ‘Wise Blood’ in 1952 explored the “religious consciousness without a religion”. No wonder then, why characters in her first and second novels were preachers of sorts. Some of her best works include ‘The Violent Bear It Away’ (1960); short story collection‘Everything That Rises Must Converge’ (1965); a collection of prose pieces Mystery and Manners( 1969) and The Complete Stories posthumously published in 1971. This book won her the 1972 National Book Award.

O’Connor had love for poultry, starting with a childhood chicken. The bird could walk backwards and ended up in a newsreel clip. Alongside she kept pheasants, ducks, turkeys, and quail. In her 20s, O’Connor mail-ordered six peacocks, a peahen, and four peachicks. They later populated her fiction.

Hit by lupus erythematosus, inherited from her father, she was disabled for than a decade. Her posthumous book PrayerJourna’ (2013), a collection of private religious missives, provides insight into her life. Flannery O'Connor died of lupus on August 3, 1964, in Milledgeville, Georgia.