Flannery O'Connor

     Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1925. O'Connor was enrolled in St. Vincent's, a Catholic parochial school until 1938. The family then moved to the small town of Milledgeville after O'Connor's father was diagnosed with lupus. O'Connor was 15 when she lost her father to lupus.

     O'Connor went on to graduate from Georgia State College for Women. There, she studied the social sciences. O'Connor was also the editor of the college's literary magazine Corinthian. As editor, O'Connor would provide the literary magazine with cartoons, fiction, essays, and occasional poems.

     Then, in 1945, O'Connor attended the State University of Iowa, studying creative writing in the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. In 1947, O'Connor had obtained her Master of Fine Arts degree.

     It was in 1950 when O'Connor was diagnosed with lupus, the same disease that killed her father. After being admitted to an Atlanta hospital after getting severely ill, she was finally released in 1959. She then moved to Andalusia, which was located near Milledgeville.

     O'Connor was granted the honor of holding an audience with the Pope in 1958. She was also awarded the honorary Doctor of Letters degrees in 1963 by Smith College. Flannery O'Connor was awarded the National Book Award for Fiction in 1972.

     Then, in 1964, at the age of 39, Flannery O'Connor died due to lupus.

     Following her schooling, O'Connor won the Rinehart-Iowa Fiction Award for a first novel. She had submitted a portion of her novel, Wise Blood. She was then accepted at Yaddo, which was an artists' retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York. She remained at Yaddo for only three months due to unforeseen circumstances.

     O'Connor published her first short story collection in 1955, which was "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." These pieces made O'Connor's Christian vision and comic sense known to readers. Then, in 1960, she released the novel The Violent Bear It Away, this novel showing those same themes. A second selection of short stories was published after O'Connor's death in 1965 titled Everything That Rises Must Converge. This selection contains the more popular stories such as "Revelation."