Flannery was a Southern Gothic writer, generally considered the best the best of the lot, in the same league with Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty. Their South was a decayed and fallen homeland, its people damned. Her sense of humor was keen and sharp, and sometimes just a bit macabre. Mixed in with her humor there was always the tragic and the shocking. She did not publish much, only thirty-one stories, a couple of novels, some of her speeches and a collection of letters.
She was born March 25, 1925. in Savannah, Georgia. Her mother was Regina L. (Cline), whose father had been mayor of Milledgeville (the first capitol of Georgia). Her father, Edward F. O'Connor, who was into realty in construction, died when she was sixteen. From the age of twelve Flannery lived on a farm near Milledgeville, where she raised peacocks and wrote her bizaare stories. After high school she went to Georgia State College for Women there in Milledgeville, thence to the University of Iowa to enroll in Paul Engle's famous creative writing workshops. For a time after she received her MFA at Iowa, she studied at Yaddo, a writers/painters/musicians retreat in Saratoga Springs, N. Y.
Flannery was a Catholic but she wrote about Protestant fanatics. Of this she said, "I can write about Protestant believers better than Catholic believers because they express their belief in diverse kinds of dramatic action which is obvious enough for me to catch. I can't write about anything subtle."
Wise Blood, one of Flannery's two novels, was turned into a memorable movie; and although it never became a great popular success, for students of Southern gothic literature it is a masterpiece. John Huston, who read the novel in 1978 and produced it at a cost of $2,000,000, had this to say: "There were seven outstanding performances in Wise Blood. Only three of those seven actors have any reputation to speak of: Brad Dourif, Ned Beatty and Harry Dean Stanton. The other four are unknowns. They are all great stars, as far as I'm concerned. Nothing would make me happier than to see this picture gain popular acceptance and turn a profit. It would prove something. I'm not sure what... but something." ( John Huston in An Open Book, 1988)
Like her father, Flannery died at an early age from lupus. In the last several years of her life she had to move about on crutches. As a direct result of an abdominal operation, which reactivated the lupus, she died on August 3, 1964. She was 39.
The farm near Milledgeville, where Flannery lived out the last years of her life, is now Andalusia. It was called the Grey Quail Farm when it was purchased in 1941 by Dr. Bernard M. Cline, O'Connor's uncle. He renamed it Red Sorrel Farm for one of his favorite horses. Several years later, O'Connor discovered an earlier name for the farm, Andalusia, and persuaded the family to change it. Mrs. Regina Cline O'Connor and Mr. Louis Cline inherited the farm in 1947, after Dr. Cline's death.

A complete listing of her works:

Wise Blood, 1952 (novel)
A Good Man Is Hard To Find, and Other Stories, 1955 (published in England as The Artificial Nigger)
The Violent Bear It Away, 1960 (novel)
A Memoir of Mary Ann,1962 (ed., published in England as Death of a Child)
Three by Flannery O'Connor, 1964 (short stories)
Everything That Rises Must Converge, 1965 (a collection of short stories, with an introduction by Robert Fitzgerald)
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, 1969 (ed. by Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald)
The Complete Short Stories of Flannery O'Connor, 1971 ( won the National Book Award)
The Habit of Being: Letters, 1979 (ed. by Sally Fitzgerald)
The Presence of Grace and Other Book Reviews, 1983 (ed. by Carter W. Martin)
The Correspondence of Flannery O'Connor and the Brainars Cheneys, 1986 (edited by C. Ralph Stephens)
Collected Works, 1988 (ed. by Sally Fitzgerald)