Considered one of the most powerful voices of American literary fiction, Flannery O'Connor was born Mary Flannery O'Connor in Savannah, Georgia, on March 25, 1925. She grew up in an ardently Catholic family. In 1945, she graduated from Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College) in Milledgeville, and continued her studies through the graduate writing program at the University of Iowa. While still at Iowa, she published her first short story and, based on a portion of the manuscript of her first novel, Wise Blood, received a publisher's prize and admission to the artistic community at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York.

She was working on the novel and staying with the family of the poet Robert Fitzgerald and his wife Sally in rural Connecticut when she was stricken with lupus, the disease that had taken her father's life at age 41. Thereafter she returned to Milledgeville...