When the film Gone With the Wind debuted in 1939, an extravagant premiere gala unfolded over three days in downtown Atlanta. Thousands gathered outside Loew’s Grand Theater, which had been decorated to resemble a Southern plantation home, to watch the stars arrive. Four Confederate veterans in uniform were presented to thunderous applause. The crowds saw the sweeping romantic drama, based on Margaret Mitchell’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1936 novel, as their story. But just a few hours southeast of the city lived a 14-year-old named Flannery O’Connor, who thought the spectacle was ridiculous.
O’Connor loathed the historical epic, though she and Mitchell had a lot in common. Both were raised by Irish Catholic families in Georgia, where Catholics were seen as outsiders by the Protestant majority, and both drew on their roots in their fiction. The similarities ended there. O’Connor rejected literature driven by nostalgia and sentimentality, qualities that she felt defined Mitchell’s work.
When she was 20, O’Connor enrolled in the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she began forging her own literary legacy. But back in Georgia, her family didn’t understand the life she was building. She wanted to become a serious writer. Her mother, Regina Cline O’Connor, wanted her to write the next Gone With the Wind.
“She was not a Southern belle. She revolted. She just thought this was crazy,” says Mark Bosco, a literary scholar who co-wrote and co-produced the 2019 documentary Flannery. “She didn’t want to write romance. She didn’t want to write nostalgia—but she wanted to play with nostalgia.”
More than a decade after Gone With the Wind’s silver screen debut, O’Connor published a story satirizing the gala’s pageantry. “A Late Encounter With the Enemy” follows a 104-year-old veteran who can’t quite recall his Civil War service, though he vividly remembers “that preemy they had in Atlanta,” where he had appeared in uniform before cheering crowds. “It was a nashnul event and they had me in it—up onto the stage,” the man says. He later performs a similar ornamental function at his granddaughter’s graduation, where, unnoticed by the young boy charged with pushing his wheelchair, he dies. The story ends with the child waiting, “with the corpse, in the long line at the Coca-Cola machine.”
March 25, 2025, would have been O’Connor’s 100th birthday. As the many events and exhibitions surrounding her centenary attest, interest in the author’s work has only deepened since her death in 1964 at age 39. In recent years, scholars have published her prayer journal and her unfinished novel; her life has been the subject of the award-winning documentary Flannery and a star-studded 2023 biographical drama. Her influence on American culture is unparalleled: O’Connor’s stories have inspired writers such as Cormac McCarthy, Alice Munro, Alice McDermott and George Saunders; musicians like Bruce Springsteen, Lucinda Williams, Sufjan Stevens and Josh Ritter; and filmmakers like the Coen brothers and Quentin Tarantino.