Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor (1925-64) spent most of her life in rural Georgia, and though she never quite fit into that world—her family was Catholic in a very Protestant region, and she was highly educated, unmarried, and some would say surly, in a world in which women were expected to be ladies—she created some of the most lasting portraits of the South, its spiritual struggles, and its grotesque humor. O'Connor suffered quite severely from lupus for much of her life and died at the age of 39, but her career profoundly influenced the development not simply of the literature of the South but of American fiction more generally. She published two novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear it Away (1960) but is most known for her short fiction, published in collections including A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955) and the posthumous Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965).