Parker's Back

Mary Flannery O’Connor was born in 1925 in Savannah, Georgia. She wrote fiction in the Southern Gothic tradition. Most of her works are set in the South and feature characters wrestling with their relationship to the Judeo-Christian God. O’Connor grew up in a prominent Roman Catholic family. Her father suffered from lupus erythematosus, an inflammatory disease caused when the immune system attacks its own tissues, which eventually grew so debilitating that the family moved to O’Connor’s mother’s childhood home in rural Milledgeville, Georgia. After graduating from Georgia State College for Women in 1945, she studied creative writing at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Despite inheriting lupus erythematosus, which eventually led to her death in 1964 at the age of 39, O’Connor completed two novels and two short story collections and frequently lectured on spirituality and literature.

While her first published book was the novel Wise Blood in 1952, O’Connor is renowned and celebrated as a short story writer. Her writing often features characters who are wrestling with some question of morality or spirituality as they navigate a bleak and violent world. Although there are elements of horror and the grotesque in her work, she used the Southern