Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964), American writer, whose novels and short stories focusing on humanity's spiritual deformity and flight from redemption earned her a unique place in 20th-century American fiction.

Born in Savannah, Georgia, Mary Flannery O'Connor was educated at the Georgia State College for Women and the State University of Iowa (now called the University of Iowa). Most of her life was spent in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she raised peacocks and wrote. O'Connor's work, essentially two novels and two volumes of short stories, has been described as an unlikely mixture of southern Gothic, prophecy, and evangelistic Roman Catholicism. The novels are Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960); the short-story collections are A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything that Rises Must Converge (published posthumously, 1965). O'Connor is frequently compared to the American novelist William Faulkner for her portrayal of southern character and milieu and to the Austrian writer Franz Kafka for her preoccupation with the grotesque. A basic theme of her work is the individual's vain attempt to escape the grace of God, and her work is profoundly and pervasively religious. She died of lupus, a disease that crippled her for the last ten years of her life.