Flannery O'Connor

Born on March 25, 1925, in Savannah, Georgia, Mary Flannery O’Connor was the only child of Edward and Regina Cline O’Connor, both of devout Irish Catholic families in the predominantly Protestant South. At five she taught a chicken to walk backward, a feat that was filmed by Pathé News and that she later identified as the high point of her life, “everything after that has been anticlimax.” When her father was diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus, the family relocated to her mother’s ancestral home in Milledgeville, Georgia; he died in 1941. She studied at Georgia State College for Women, drew cartoons for the college newspaper, and won a fellowship to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she studied under Paul Engle and Andrew Lytle. Her first novel, Wise Blood (1952), a grotesque comedy about a man who founds a Church Without Christ, baffled reviewers who could not tell whether she was mocking or affirming belief. A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955), a collection of stories laced with violence and sudden grace, established her reputation. In 1952, at twenty-seven, she was diagnosed with the same lupus that had killed her father. She returned to Milledgeville and spent the remaining twelve years of her life on the family dairy farm, Andalusia, raising peafowl, corresponding voluminously, and writing fiction of startling ferocity. The Violent Bear It Away (1960) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (published posthumously in 1965) confirmed her as one of the great American short story writers. Her fiction insists on the action of divine grace in a fallen world, usually arriving through shock, disfigurement, or death. She died on August 3, 1964, at the age of thirty-nine.

In 1958 a cousin sent her on pilgrimage to Lourdes, hoping the waters would cure her lupus. O'Connor dreaded the public baths, joking she could die for her religion easier than take a bath for it. She stepped in anyway and prayed not for her health but for the stalled novel on her desk.