U.S. Post Office Issues Flannery O'Connor Stamp
Posted on July 12, 2015
The U.S. Postal Service has issued a Flannery O'Connor stamp. The stamp is the 30th entry in the Literary Arts series. The 93-cent stamp was issued on June 5th.
Flannery O'Connor won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction in 1972 for her short story collection, The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor, which was published posthumously. Her story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories," was a finalist for the 1956 National Book Award in Fiction.
O'Connor's fiction often featured flawed characters, dark sometimes matter and contained dark humor. She published two novels and two short story collections during her career. She also wrote short stories for magazines, such as the Sewanee Review. Her body of work also includes essays, book reviews and poetry. She edited the Corinthian, a college literary magazine, while attending Georgia State College for Women.
The stamp was designed by Phil Jordan. The photograph used is based on a black-and-white photograph taken of Flannery when she was a student at the Georgia State College for Women. The stamp also contains images of peacock feathers. She raised peacocks on her family's diary farm in Andalusia, Georgia.
A New York Times article is critical of the stamp for portraying a young O'Connor instead of a more grown-up photograph that "contained some taste of her strange and majestic artistic vision." The Times writer Lawrence Downes would have a preferred a photograph of O'Connor in her iconic cat-eye glasses.
Image: U.S. Post Office
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