Flannery O’Connor

Flannery O’Connor was born in 1925 in Savannah, Georgia, to Catholic parents. When she was 15, her family moved to Milledgeville, Georgia, and her father died of lupus a year later. She attended Georgia State College for Women and then, in 1946, the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she got to know other major figures in Southern literature such as Robert Penn Warren and Andrew Lytle. She published her first book, the novel Wise Blood, in 1952. That same year, she was diagnosed with lupus and returned to the family farm in Milledgeville, where she wrote, attended Mass, raised peacocks, and maintained a wide correspondence, including with writers like Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. A Good Man Is Hard to Find, her first short story collection, was published in 1955. Her second novel, The Violent Bear It Away, followed in 1960. She died in 1964 of complications from lupus. Her last two short story collections, Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) and The Complete Stories (1971), were published posthumously, with the latter winning the 1972 National Book Award for Fiction.