Mary Flannery O'Connor (March 25, 1925 – August 3, 1964) was an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist known for her two novels and 31 short stories, as well as numerous reviews and commentaries. She was a Southern writer who often employed a sardonic Southern Gothic style, heavily relying on regional settings and grotesque characters, frequently in violent situations. The unsentimental acceptance or rejection of the limitations or imperfections or differences of these characters—whether attributed to disability, race, crime, religion, or sanity—typically underpins the drama. Her writing was deeply influenced by her Roman Catholic faith, often exploring questions of Catholicism-defined 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.

Her critically acclaimed novels Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960) and short stories, collected in works such as A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955), are noted for their explorations of religious faith and a spare literary style. Educated at the Georgia State College for Women, O'Connor further honed her writing skills at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and wrote much of Wise Blood at the artist colony of Yaddo in upstate New York. She lived most of her adult life on Andalusia, the ancestral farm of her family outside Milledgeville, Georgia. With the publication of Everything That Rises Must Converge (1964), and her death at the age of 39, America lost one of its most gifted writers at the height of her powers.