Andalusia: Where Flannery O'Connor Wrote Among the Peacocks

A few miles west of Milledgeville sits a white farmhouse on a hill that produced some of the most unsettling and spiritually penetrating fiction of the twentieth century. Andalusia was the home of Flannery O'Connor from nineteen fifty-one until her death in nineteen sixty-four, and almost everything she wrote after her diagnosis with lupus came out of that quiet, strange place.

O'Connor had been living in New York, studying at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, beginning a promising career, when the disease announced itself. Lupus had killed her father when she was fifteen. Now it was claiming her too. She came back to Georgia, back to her mother Regina's family farm, and settled in for what she understood might be a short life. She lived it with astonishing focus.

At Andalusia she wrote most of her life's work, including the novel The Violent Bear It Away in nineteen sixty, after finishing Wise Blood, published in nineteen fifty-two. She produced two short story collections, including A Good Man Is Hard to Find, which gave American fiction the grandmother and the Misfit and a highway murder that still makes students gasp decades later. She raised peacocks. She tended to an eccentric menagerie. She received visitors, wrote letters by the hundreds, and cultivated a sharp, witty correspondence that was itself a literary art.

The farm gave her material. The red Georgia clay roads, the tenant farmers and traveling Bible salesmen, the decaying plantation gentility, the hot-gospel religion of the rural South: all of it fed her particular vision of grace arriving through violence, of God pursuing souls who preferred not to be found.

She died here at age thirty-nine. The farm was designated a National Historic Landmark by the National Park Service, recognizing her as one of the most influential American authors of the mid-twentieth century. The peacocks are gone now, but the house and the hill and the Georgia light remain exactly as she described them.