Flannery O’Connor was born today in 1925.

O’Connor, right, with Robie Macauley and Arthur Koestler in Iowa, 1947. Photo: C. Macauley, via Wikimedia Commons

BARRY HANNAH

Flannery O’Connor was probably the biggest influence in my mature writing life. I didn’t discover her until I was at Arkansas, and I didn’t read her until I was around twenty-five, twenty-six. She was so powerful, she just knocked me down. I still read Flannery and teach her.

INTERVIEWER

What was it that got you? Was there something specific?

HANNAH

“A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and then I read everything.

I thought the author was a guy. I thought it was a guy for three years until someone clued me in very quietly at Arkansas. “It’s a woman, Barry.” Her work is so mean. The women are treated so harshly. The misogyny and religion. It was so foreign and Southern to me. She certainly was amazing.

—Barry Hannah, the Art of Fiction No. 184, 2004