(Mary) Flannery O'Connor (1925– 1964), short story writer and novelist, was born in Savannah, Georgia. At age twelve she moved with her family to Milledgeville, Georgia, where her family had lived since before the Civil War. She knew from an early age that she wanted to write, and after graduating from the Georgia State College for Women, she left her home state to study writing at the University of Iowa. Her first story, "The Geranium," was published while she was there. To gain some perspective on contemporary culture, she moved to a writer's colony called Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York, and then to New York City and Connecticut.

Like her father, O'Connor contracted disseminated lupus. At age twenty-five, she returned to Milledgeville to live with her mother on the family dairy farm called "Andalusia," where she wrote and raised peacocks. Her disease increasingly confined her and, within five years, she was able to walk only with crutches. Her darkest fiction was written after the onset of her illness, and the themes of human limitations and mortality became more and more prominent. But she did not allow her illness to destroy her enjoyment of life, her sense of humor, or her ability to work. She kept up a lively and extensive correspondence with friends, other authors, and readers until her death at age thirty-nine. O'Connor's first novel, Wise Blood, was published in 1952. This was followed by a collection of short stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1953), a second novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960), and a second short story collection, Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965).