Flannery O'Connor Honored

Short story writer and novelist Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) will be honored by the United States Postal Service (USPS) with this beautiful 93¢, three-ounce stamp to be issued on Friday. The Savannah-born author is perhaps best known for her 1955 collection, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, though she also posthumously won the National Book Award for her Complete Stories in 1972. Her novels include Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960), and her writing is associated with Southern Gothic style, heavy on regional settings and dark humor.    

The 30th stamp in the USPS's Literary Arts series--which includes Ralph Ellison, Mark Twain, and Ernest Hemingway, among others--it features a watercolor image of O'Connor, based on a black-and-white photograph taken when she was a student at Georgia State College for Women in the 1940s. The vivid peacock feathers surrounding her call to mind the peafowl she raised on a farm in Georgia during the last fourteen years of her life, after she had been diagnosed with lupus. She died at 39 of complications from the disease.

A First Day Cover and a Digital Color Postmark, neat additions to any O'Connor collection, will also be made available from the USPS. The stamp issues from McLean, Virginia.

Image via USPS. The artist for this stamp was Sam Weber. Art director Phil Jordan designed the stamp.