A short story writer and novelist, O’Connor was born in 1925 in Savannah and moved here to the family farm as a young woman. The author of Southern Gothic classics including “Wise Blood’’ and “Everything That Rises Must Converge,’’ O’Connor, who never married, wrote some of her best work at Andalusia and died at 39 from lupus in 1964.
Before heading to Georgia with my old college roommate and rugby pal, “Surfer’’ John Hearin, I also stopped in Gainesville, Fla., to see my mentor, the acclaimed novelist Harry Crews. Seated in his living room, Crews, 74, noted that the best photographs of O’Connor are like those portraits of the Byzantine Christ.
“She stared right into the camera with that baleful glare,’’ Crews said. “Break your back with that stare.’’
I read just about everything O’Connor wrote because of Crews, and went to Georgia to plumb the roots of a great American writer. The O’Connor residence, which was built in the 1850s, is situated on a rise a quarter-mile from the main road. The 544-acre complex includes the main house, the 30-foot water tower and well, and several dilapidated outbuildings. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the one-time dairy farm is maintained by the nonprofit Flannery O’Connor - Andalusia Foundation, which opened the site to visitors in 2003.
The next morning we were greeted at the farm by Mark Jurgensen, 52, who works for the foundation. Jurgensen explained that Andalusia was purchased by O’Connor’s uncle, Dr. Bernard Cline, in the 1930s and that she “knew this place as a child.’’ Cline willed part ownership of the farm to O’Connor’s mother, and she and her daughter came to live here in 1951, after O’Connor had earned her master’s at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop and had begun suffering from lupus.
