‘The Habit of Art’

Milledgeville, Georgia

Drawing of a family sitting in a living room

Illustration for ‘Clubs,’ The Spectrum, Spring 1944

Georgia State College & University

In 1955 Flannery O’Connor wrote to her friend Elizabeth McKee that “the only way to get here”—her home, the antebellum farm Andalusia—“is by bus or buzzard.” Yet many came to see her, and many still come. In fact, there’s a small sign to let you know where to turn off Highway 441 for Andalusia—it’s right across the street from a barbeque place—but the sign is so small you might mistake it for a back or side entrance. Go past the sign, and within a few minutes’ drive you’ll see O’Connor’s red-roofed house set on a slight hill and girded by pecan trees.

For the past eight years Andalusia and its surrounding acres have been open to the public. In that time, nearly 30,000 visitors have made the pilgrimage to Milledgeville, where old wrought iron signs declare in white letters the town a “bird sanctuary.” Here O’Connor grew up and, weakened by bouts of lupus in her late twenties, returned for the last 13 years of her life, and wrote.

Her slender, meticulously wrought corpus, shot through with Gothic sensibility in its depiction of what she famously termed the “Christ-haunted South,” has afforded her a high spot in 20th-century American fiction. The popularity of her stories has increased steadily since her death in 1964 at 39, making her a misfit in the mainstream. When the Library of America published her complete works in 1988, the volume outsold William Faulkner’s, published three years prior. And just this past summer Penguin released A Good Hard Look, in which novelist Ann Napolitano uses O’Connor doubly as muse and character in a story set in Milledge-ville. (The dust jacket features her favorite bird: the peacock.)