Flannery O'Connor was a Southern writer known for her Southern Gothic style that relied on regional settings and grotesque characters. She was a devout Catholic whose writing often explored questions of morality and ethics. After graduating from college, she studied at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and later returned to her family farm in Georgia after being diagnosed with lupus. There, she raised peafowl and incorporated images of them into her two novels and short stories that examined the decaying American South and morally flawed characters through a darkly humorous lens.

1. Flannery O’Connor 1925 - 1964

2. Flannery O’Connor She was a Southern writer who often wrote in a Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters. O'Connor's writing also reflected her own Roman Catholic faith, and frequently examined questions of morality and ethics.

3. Flannery O’Connor After graduating from Peabody Laboratory School in 1942, she entered Georgia State College for Women, an accelerated three-year program where she graduated with a Social Sciences degree. In 1946 she was accepted into the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she first went to study journalism.

4. Flannery O’Connor In 1951 she was diagnosed with disseminated lupus, and returned to her mother’s farm, called Andalusia, in Milledgeville, Georgia. Although she was expected to live only five more years, it would be fourteen years before her death.

5. Flannery O’Connor At Andalusia, she raised and nurtured some 100 peafowl. She was fascinated by birds of all kinds and incorporated images of peacocks into her books.

6. Flannery O’Connor She published two novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away. Her work was humorous and she was considered an American regionalist. Early in her life she hoped to be a cartoonist and she had a way of transforming her characters in much the same way.

7. Flannery O’Connor She belonged to the Southern Gothic tradition that focused on the decaying South and its damned people. O'Connor's body of work was small, consisting of only thirty-one stories, two novels, and some speeches and letters. Her texts usually take place in the South and revolve around morally flawed characters, while the issue of race often appears in the background.

8. Flannery O’Connor At the age of 21 she published her first short story, 'The Geranium', in Accent. In the following year she received the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Literature. O'Connor was the first fiction writer born in the twentieth century to have her works collected and published by the Library of America.