Flannery O'Connor

Mary Flannery O'Connor was born in 1925 in Savannah, Georgia, the only child of a Catholic family. When she was five, a newsreel company filmed a chicken she had taught to walk backward. The family moved to Milledgeville, Georgia, and her father died of lupus in 1941. She studied at the Georgia State College for Women and then at the Writers' Workshop of the University of Iowa. Her first novel, Wise Blood, appeared in 1952. In 1951 she was diagnosed with lupus, the disease that had killed her father, and she spent the rest of her life with her mother on the family farm, Andalusia, near Milledgeville, where she raised peacocks and other birds. She wrote in the mornings and corresponded with many friends. Her short-story collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and her later stories, often violent and darkly comic, present characters in the rural South facing moments of grace. She died in 1964 at the age of 39. Her Complete Stories won the National Book Award in 1972.

Flannery O'Connor is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: A devout Catholic whose faith shapes her fiction. Source: Wikipedia