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Flannery O'Connor

Biography

Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925. When she died at the age of 39, America lost one of its most gifted writers at the height of her powers. O’Connor wrote two novels, WISE BLOOD (1952) and THE VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY (1960), and two story collections, A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND (1955) and EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE (1964). Her COMPLETE STORIES, published posthumously in 1972, won the National Book Award that year, and in a 2009 online poll it was voted as the best book to have won the award in the contest’s 60-year history. Her essays were published in MYSTERY AND MANNERS (1969) and her letters in THE HABIT OF BEING (1979). In 1988 the Library of America published her COLLECTED WORKS; she was the first postwar writer to be so honored. O’Connor was educated at the Georgia State College for Women, studied writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and wrote much of WISE BLOOD at the Yaddo artists’ colony in upstate New York. She lived most of her adult life on her family’s ancestral farm, Andalusia, outside Milledgeville, Georgia.

Flannery O'Connor

Books by Flannery O'Connor

written by Flannery O'Connor, edited by W. A. Sessions - Christian, Nonfiction, Spirituality

Written between 1946 and 1947 while Flannery O'Connor was a student far from home at the University of Iowa, A PRAYER JOURNAL is a rare portal into the interior life of the great writer. Not only does it map O'Connor's singular relationship with the divine, but it shows how entwined her literary desire was with her yearning for God.