O'Connor, Flannery (Mary Flannery O'Connor), 1925–64, American author, b. Savannah, Ga., grad. Women's College of Georgia (A.B., 1945), Iowa State Univ. (M.F.A., 1947). As a writer, O'Connor is highly regarded for her bizarre imagination, uncompromising moral vision, and superb literary style. Combining the grotesque and the gothic, her fiction treats contemporary Southern life in terms of stark, brutal comedy and violent tragedy. Her characters, although often deformed in both body and spirit, are impelled toward redemption. All of O'Connor's fiction reflects her strong Roman Catholic faith. Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960) are novels focusing on religious fanaticism; A Good Man Is Hard To Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) are short-story collections. Her Collected Stories was published in 1971. O'Connor was the victim of a type of lupus and spent the last ten years of her life as an invalid, writing and raising peacocks on her mother's farm near Milledgeville, Ga. She died in 1964 at 39.

Bibliography

See her Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, ed. by S. and R. Fitzgerald (1969); her letters, ed. by S. Fitzgerald, The Habit of Being (1979); studies by J. Hendin (1970) and K. Feeley (1972, 2d ed. 1982), S. Paulsen (1988), R. Giannone (1989), and B. Ragen (1989).

O'Connor, (Mary) Flannery

(born March 25, 1925, Savannah, Ga., U.S.—died Aug. 3, 1964, Milledgeville, Ga.) U.S. writer. She spent most of her life on her mother's farm in Milledgeville, Ga. A devout Roman Catholic, she usually set her works in the rural South and often examined the relationship between the individual and God by putting her characters in grotesque and extreme situations. Her first novel, Wise Blood (1952), combines a keen ear for common speech, a caustic religious imagination, and a flair for the absurd that characterized all of her work. With the story collections A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965), she was acclaimed as a master of the form. Her other work of fiction was the novel The Violent Bear It Away (1960). Long crippled by lupus, she died at age 39. The Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction is the preeminent American award of its kind.

O'Connor, (Mary) Flannery (1925–64) writer; born in Savannah, Ga. She studied at the Women's College of Georgia (now Georgia College; B.A. 1945), and the State University of Iowa (M.F.A. 1947). She lived in Milledgeville, Ga., and suffered from lupus, a disease of the connective tissues, the cause of her father's death (1941) and her own premature death. She was a devout Catholic and her work is infused with visions of powerful spiritual struggles. She is considered a master of the short story form, as seen in her collection, A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955). Her acclaimed Gothic Southern novels include Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960).