National Register Listing

Andalusia

NW of Milledgeville on U.S. 441, Milledgeville, GA

This 547-acre farm, named by the O'Connors "Andalusia," is nationally significant as the home of the novelist and short-story writer Mary Flannery O'Connor (1924-1964) during the major portion of her productive career.

Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, the only child of Edward F. and Regina Cline O'Connor. O'Connor moved to Milledgeville in 1937 with her parents when her father was 111 with lupus, a blood disease that would greatly shorten her own life. She graduated from Georgia Woman's College in Milledgeville in 1945 with a degree in English and a fellowship to the noted Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. She published a short story before her graduation from the University of Iowa in 1947. From Iowa, she went to Yaddo Writers' Colony and from there to New York City, where she met Robert and Sally Fitzgerald. She spent from July 1949, until December 1950, with them in Connecticut, working on her first novel, Wise Blood. Later that winter, she was diagnosed as having lupus. In the summer of 1951, Miss O'Connor and her widowed mother moved to the family farm, "Andalusia," where she lived for thirteen years, until her death in 1964.

It was at "Andalusia" that O'Connor revised Wise Blood and wrote another novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960), as well as her highly acclaimed collections of short stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge, published posthumous Ty Tn 1965. Although her two novels received widespread critical acclaim, it is for the short stories that she is most widely praised and remembered. She has been called the "premier short-story writer of her generation." Her numerous awards include the Kenyon Fellowship in fiction, three O'Henry Awards for her short stories, and grants from the Ford Foundation and the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

Although O'Connor made occasional speaking trips, lupus largely confined her to "Andalusia" during her productive career. There, she routinely wrote every morning until noon and spent her afternoons and evenings tending her peafowl or entertaining visitors. The landscape of "Andalusia", including the ever-present peafowls, figures prominently in her fiction. It is commonly suggested that Southern fiction is marked by the importance given to a sense of place, that the landscape becomes a major force in the shaping of the action. Certainly, this is true in Flannery O'Connor's work. Andalusia provided for her not only a place to live and write but a functional landscape in which to set her fiction. For example, her short story, "The Displaced Person," which was filmed in Andalusia for PBS in 1976, is set on a dairy farm much like Andalusia, where in 1960 her mother was running a dairy farm with the help of a displaced Polish family. Of course, one cannot reduce O'Connor's fiction to the external landscape, but the link between Andalusia and her productive career is profoundly apparent in her work.

Andalusia's primary significance has been attained within the last fifty years. The property should be considered for the National Register at this time due to its overriding national significance in American literature. It was for her short stories that she is best remembered and for which she won national awards, financial grants, and critical acclaim. Andalusia is cited in many guides to landmarks of literature and students are often taken there for the rare opportunity to see the setting for many of O'Connor's stories, as well as where she spent her productive years. This opportunity is rare for anyone studying a legendary writer. Recognizing the site's national importance is also necessary for light of encroaching commercial development and pressure on the O'Connor family to sell due to this, which is a primary reason this nomination is proposed at this time.

Local significance of the building:
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1980.