Flannery O’Connor | Biography, Short Stories, Books, Style, & Facts
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Flannery O’Connor, American novelist and short-story writer whose darkly comic works, usually set in the rural American South, concern the individual’s relationship to God. Her short-story collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find, and Other Stories (1955) showed her to be a master of the form.
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Encyclopedia Britannica
Flannery O’Connor (born March 25, 1925, Savannah, Georgia, U.S.—died August 3, 1964, Milledgeville, Georgia) was an American novelist and short-story writer whose works, usually set in the rural American South and often treating of alienation, concern the relationship between the individual and God.

O’Connor grew up in a prominent Roman Catholic family in her native Georgia. She lived in Savannah until her adolescence, but the worsening of her father’s lupus erythematosus forced the family to relocate in 1938 to the home in rural Milledgeville where her mother had been raised. After graduating from Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College & State University) in 1945, she studied creative writing at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

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Her first published work, a short story, appeared in the magazine Accent in 1946. Her first novel, Wise Blood (1952; film 1979), explores, in O’Connor’s own words, the “religious consciousness without a religion.” Wise Blood consists of a series of near-independent chapters—many of which originated in previously published short stories—that tell the tale of Hazel Motes, a preacher’s grandson who returns from military service to his hometown after losing his faith and then relocates to another town, this one populated by a grotesque cast of itinerant loners, false prophets, and displaced persons on the make. His lonely tragicomic search for redemption, which includes his founding of the Church Without Christ, becomes increasingly violent and phantasmagorical. Wise Blood combines the keen ear for common speech, the caustic religious imagination, and the flair for the absurd that were to characterize O’Connor’s subsequent work. With the publication of further short stories, first collected in A Good Man Is Hard to Find, and Other Stories (1955), she came to be regarded as a master of the form. The collection’s eponymous story became possibly her best-known work. In it O’Connor created an unexpected agent of salvation in the character of an escaped convict called The Misfit, who kills a quarreling family on vacation in the Deep South.

Her other works of fiction are a novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960), and the short-story collection Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965). A collection of occasional prose pieces, Mystery and Manners, appeared in 1969. The Complete Stories, published posthumously in 1971, contains several stories that had not previously appeared in book form; it won a National Book Award in 1972.