Where: Milledgeville, Georgia
When: year-round
If you like: history, arts and culture
Why you should go: Standing on the front porch of Flannery O’Connor’s Andalusia, the Middle Georgia farm where the Southern literary giant spent the last thirteen years of her life, feels like standing in one of her stories. You can see right where a tractor in the front meadow might have tipped over, for instance, crushing a man under its weight as it does in the novella The Displaced Person. You might spy the barn where the Bible salesman in “Good Country People” ran off from, carting a stolen prosthetic leg. “There’s such an uncanny feeling when you’re here because of O’Connor’s realism,” says Katie Simon, the interim executive director of the Flannery O’Connor Institute for the Humanities at Georgia College and State University, which has spent the past few years restoring the circa-1850s home and approximately five hundred acres of surrounding farmland to the period when O’Connor lived there (1951 to 1964, when she died of lupus).
All this year, and especially during the week of March 25 (what would have been the writer’s one hundredth birthday), Andalusia will honor her far-reaching legacy with a celebration that includes a screening of Ethan Hawke’s 2023 movie about O’Connor, Wildcat, followed by a panel discussion by the film’s producers; a singer-songwriter workshop; a cake cutting; free tours; and a talk by the pop-culture portraitist Panhandle Slim, who has frequently depicted O’Connor’s likeness.
G&G tip: In 2023, GCSU cut the ribbon on a new interpretive center, which hosts events and displays artifacts from O’Connor’s life. Stop in there as well as in GCSU’s Ina Dillard Russell Library in downtown Milledgeville, where you can browse manuscripts, letters, books, and other items O’Connor owned.
