Flannery O’Connor

(1925 - 1964)

Having received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1947, Flannery O’Connor spent time in New York and Connecticut before being diagnosed with lupus in 1951. She spent the rest of her life on her 544-acre Georgia farm with her mother and some forty peacocks, publishing Wise Blood in 1952 and “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” in 1955. About a rare trip, to Lourdes, France, in 1958, she said, “I prayed there for the novel I was working on, not for my bones, which I cared about less.”