Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge
Flannery O'Connor was, as she put it, an "innocent" speller. She preferred to spell words as they sounded to her, usually heavily inflected with Southern dialect. You'll find just as many "oncets" in her letters as you will in The Misfit's speech. (Source: O'Connor, Flannery. The Habit of Being. Edited and with an introduction by Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979, xiv.)
On writing in dialect, O'Connor once said: "If my characters speak Southern, it's because I do." (Source)
O'Connor was diagnosed with lupus in 1950. Her father had died of the disease, as she eventually would. From 1955 onwards, she was forced to spend the rest of her life on crutches. (Source)
O'Connor made one trip to Europe to go on pilgrimage to Lourdes, the location of the miraculous healing spring discovered by St. Bernadette. O'Connor wrote to a friend that she did not ask for healing of her body so much as of her flagging novel, The Violent Bear it Away. She maintained that her prayer was granted: she finished it. (Source: O'Connor, Flannery. The Habit of Being. Edited and with an introduction by Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979.)
Once she was forced to return to her family home, because of lupus, Flannery O'Connor took up raising peacocks. She soon had a farm full of them. She was also fond of Muscovy ducks, Chinese geese, and one-eyed swans. (Source: O'Connor, Flannery. The Habit of Being. Edited and with an introduction by Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979, xvi.)
Being secluded at home, Flannery O'Connor kept in contact with the outside world through a very lively correspondence. Although she corresponded with people to whom she was particularly close, she also got plenty of letters from all kinds of random people, and usually responded to them. One rather unkind critic wrote: "Any crank can write to her and get an answer."(Source: O'Connor, Flannery. The Habit of Being. Edited and with an introduction by Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979, xiv.)
After the publication of "A Good Man is Hard to Find," Flannery O'Connor started to receive letters from single men who tried to assure her that, actually, good men weren't so hard to find. (Source: O'Connor, Flannery. The Habit of Being. Edited and with an introduction by Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979, 87.)