Mary Flannery O'Connor was an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Born on March 25, 1925, and passing on August 3, 1964, she wrote two novels and 31 short stories along with a number of reviews and commentaries.

She was a Southern writer who often wrote in a sardonic Southern Gothic style, relying heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters often in violent situations. An unsentimental acceptance or rejection of the limitations, imperfections, or differences of these characters (whether attributed to disability, race, crime, religion, or sanity) typically underpins the drama.

Her writing often reflects her Catholic faith, and frequently examines questions of morality and ethics. Her posthumously compiled Complete Stories won the 1972 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and has been the subject of enduring praise.

Critics note her novels Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960) and her short stories, collected in such works as A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955), for their explorations of religious faith and a spare literary style. O'Connor was educated at the Georgia State College for Women and then studied writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She wrote much of Wise Blood at the colony of artists at Yaddo in upstate New York. She lived most of her adult life on Andalusia, the ancestral farm of her family outside Milledgeville, Georgia. O'Connor wrote Everything That Rises Must Converge (1964). When she died at the age of 39, America lost one of its most gifted writers at the height of her powers.