JMU Professor Pens First Full Bio of Flannery O'Connor

Jean W. Cash, who has taught the works of Southern writer Flannery O'Connor for 25 years, has written the first full-length biography of the National Book Award winner best known for her powerful short stories of often grotesque characters.

Flannery O'Connor, A Life, published in August by the University of Tennessee Press, chronicles the life of the woman who wrote 32 short stories, two novels and numerous literary reviews during a lifetime than spanned only 39 years from 1925 to 1964, when she died from complications of the disease lupus.

"She had an ear unequalled to almost any other Southern writer," said Cash, an English professor at James Madison University. "I tell students, 'Faulkner's my god, but she's better with dialect than he is.' She just had an absolute ear for the way Southern people talk."

Cash first studied O'Connor while working on her Ph.D. at the University of Mississippi in the late 1970s. "What really got me interested in her was the letters," Cash said, referring to a publication culled from O'Connor's voluminous correspondence.

Cash studied many more O'Connor letters held in Georgia College and State University's Flannery O'Connor Collection and conducted interviews with O'Connor friends, classmates and teachers from her days at Peabody High School and Georgia State College for Women, both in Milledgeville, and at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

"I see this as a strong point of the biography," Cash said, "the interviews that I did with people that she knew everywhere."

The only O'Connor family members she was able to interview were distant cousins in Savannah because closer family refused to cooperate with the project. Cash describes the biography as "a portrait," because "it's not the life, it is a life. It's what I was able to do given the kind of circumscribed situation that I found myself involved in once I realized the family wouldn't cooperate at all."

Cash was taken aback by the family's reaction to her requests for interviews and to quote unpublished O'Connor correspondence. Cash had previously enjoyed a cordial relationship with O'Connor's literary executor Robert Giroux, receiving permission to quote from unpublished material for a dozen articles on O'Connor she published from 1986 through the 1990s.

The family's refusal to permit direct quotations required Cash to go back through her entire manuscript to paraphrase some sections. The father of a former student, an attorney specializing in copyright law, provided clear guidelines for the paraphrasing. Cash has since learned from other O'Connor scholars that an "official" biographer (who has since died) had been selected by the family.

"I give the University of Tennessee Press a huge amount of credit for staying with me," Cash said. "I think the paraphrase is all right."

Cash decided early to write a straight chronological biography up to 1949 when O'Connor fell ill with lupus, the same disease that claimed the life of her father, and had to return home to Milledgeville. "The last half of the book deals with everything she did once she's home to keep herself artistically active clear up to the end," Cash said.

Chapters emerged on O'Connor's choosing vocation over marriage, accommodating her domineering mother and sustaining relationships with friends. While researching and writing, Cash focused on four main qualities of O'Connor, qualities she's always told her students they must be aware of to understand the writer -- her absolute dedication to Catholicism, her dedication to her vocation, her "Southernness" and her illness.

"I found no evidence anywhere that she ever had any serious doubts at all, ever," Cash said of O'Connor's deep religious faith. "This includes whatever disappointments came in her life -- the illness, having to move back home when she didn't want to -- none of this fazed that faith. She was a total and absolute believer."

Some researchers have studied O'Connor's writings and correspondence for clues to her sexual preferences. "I perceive a clear decision to never marry because, as a Catholic, if she had married in those days when birth control was totally forbidden, she would have died immediately," Cash said, believing that O'Connor feared pregnancy would be fatal. "So I think she made this absolute decision, the choice, writing as vocation over any marital life."

While sources told her O'Connor never talked about her health, Cash said there are comments in letters that seem to indicate that she thought she might live a normal lifespan.

"But certainly that last year, she knew she was dying," Cash said.