Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor was an American writer born in Savannah, Georgia, on 25 March 1925. She spent much of her adult life in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she lived on her family's farm and wrote steadily despite lupus, the illness that she inherited from her father and that ended her life at thirty-nine, on 3 August 1964.

She is best known for her short stories and two short novels, set mostly in the rural South. Her work is darkly comic and often startling, filled with preachers, drifters, scheming relatives and proud, self-satisfied people who are shaken by sudden violence or unexpected grace. A committed Catholic, she wrote about faith with little sentiment, using grotesque figures to show how hard spiritual change can be. Her sharp ear for speech and her unflinching moral vision have made her one of the most admired American fiction writers of the twentieth century.