ABOUT THE EXHIBIT

American novelist, short story writer and essayist Flannery O’Connor was born on March 25, 1925, in the same year that Nashville’s Fugitive literary journal published its final issue. The Fugitives and the writers they mentored went on to revolutionize literary instruction through works such as Understanding Fiction, which O’Connor studied at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. In the 1950s, O’Connor wrote that the Fugitives “are now here there and yonder,”* and she embraced a similar expansiveness in her essay “The Church and the Fiction Writer,” which highlighted the dangers of writing for a “limited circle.” This exhibit explores the “here, there and yonder” of O’Connor’s own limitless circle, including her peers, mentors and those who continue to read and be changed by her work.

“Here, There, and Yonder: The Limitless Circle of Flannery O’Connor” will be on exhibit in the Vanderbilt Special Collections Library at 1101 19th Avenue S, Nashville, Tennessee, from July through September 2025.

*Flannery O’Connor to Betty Hester, 28 August 1955

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