Life And Work of Literary Icon Flannery O'Connor Highlighted On American Masters

Literary icon and Georgia native Flannery O'Connor is the subject of PBS American Masters. The program premieres Tuesday March 23 at 8 p.m. EST on GPB TV. GPB's News Leah Fleming spoke with co-directors Elizabeth Coffman and Mark Bosco about the process of finding fascinating details about O'Connor's life.

Leah Fleming: The premiere of Gone With the Wind in 1939 was na historic event for many Georgians as their home state was depicted in what is still widely considered one of the greatest films in history. The film romanticized slavery and the Confederate South, though, and that's why some networks refuse to show it these days. But back in 1939, there was one Georgian that was light years ahead of her time. Flannery O'Connor was 14 years old at the time and couldn't stand the romanticized version of the South. So, she changed the game. As we celebrate women game changers this month, PBS brings audiences a new documentary on the Savannah-born Flannery O'Connor. And there are some other women helping to tell her story. GPB TV will bring you the documentary next Tuesday night on PBS American Masters. The doc was created by filmmaker Elizabeth Kaufman and Mark Boscoe, a Flannery O'Connor historian and professor at Georgetown University. I spoke to them recently.

Leah Fleming: The big question for me is, how did the two of you come to even be involved in creating a documentary about Flannery O'Connor?

Mark Boscoe: I've always been interested in Flannery O'Connor's work as a professor, and I was actually given some tapes, some video, documentary video by a friend who knew lots of friends of Flannery O'Connor. I was hosting a conference on Flannery O'Connor actually in Chicago. And Elizabeth, as a colleague of mine, I said, listen, I'm having this conference, I have these other tapes. But would you just tape a few people who are going to be at this conference, because they're just really good scholars. Some of them knew Flannery. When she came in, I knew that we actually had something.

Elizabeth Coffman: I grew up reading about the South and really tortured about the, you know, the history of the South and the history of the Civil War and and how writers were trying to address this. So, of course, I read Flannery O'Connor's work. I was really challenged by the idea that there is only one short interview of Flannery O'Connor and not many photographs. So we really had a creative challenge trying to come up with material since there wasn't much to draw from.

Leah Fleming: So you decided to use people in the documentary like Alice Walker?

Elizabeth Coffman: Absolutely. Alice Walker has written some wonderful essays about Flannery O'Connor and about thinking how she was inspired that a woman in the 1950s could become a national icon and could become a creative writer. But Alice Walker knew she was going to tell the other side of the story.

Leah Fleming: Yes. Let's talk about the other side of the story. What are some of the things that she talks about?

Mark Boscoe: I think one of the things that, doing a biography of O'Connor, you have to take seriously the fact that she was living and breathing in the South during the dismantling of the Jim Crow, you know, era. And so there's this sense of the kind of white presumptions of just of life in general in her, in Milledgeville and in Georgia, in Savannah. All that kind of stuff is still part of O'Connor's kind of, you know, background. And she and her stories are trying to basically kind of critique and interrogate some of those presumptions with her characters. But she always comes at it as a woman who is white from the South. And so what Alice Walker, I think did and what others what other Southern writers are doing is trying to say that there's more to it than that.

Leah Fleming: When you think about her, certainly she does have her place in terms of history. What do you think about when you think of women's history and Flannery, Elizabeth?

Elizabeth Coffman: First, I was delighted when we found out that the film was going to be broadcast during Women's History Month and because O'Connor's name is Mary Flannery O'Connor. And when she was in graduate school, she dropped the Mary and became Flannery O'Connor. It was difficult when she was first writing and getting published, as a woman, to do that. There were many assumptions made about being a woman writer. And O'Connor's writing was shocking for the time, whether you were male or female. But certainly in terms of of gender, she really didn't put it out front that she was a female writer.

Mark Boscoe: I think it's just really great that, you know, here we have this woman from the South and who all these people from the north, up in New York and Boston, are all excited about, you know, they're all men.

Leah Fleming: So finally, I want to ask you all if there's one thing you want people to really take away after seeing your documentary. What would that be?

Mark Boscoe: I think Flannery O'Connor is such a needed anecdote to this last couple of years of our nation. She was dealing with racism and race in her own backyard, in her own life and in her stories. She was a woman with a disability, dying of lupus at the age of 39. That her life just kind of seems to resonate. There's something about her stories that speak to a sense of, you know, "Snap out of it! Shake yourself up! And see life with more reality," I guess.

Leah Fleming: Elizabeth Coffman and Mark Boscoe are the creators of the new documentary on Flannery O'Connor. It will broadcast on PBS' American Masters series on Tuesday, March 23 at 8 p.m. on GPB TV.