Although she produced relatively few works in her short lifetime of 39 years, Mary Flannery O'Connor is considered one of the most important short story writers of the twentieth century because of her strange but interesting characters, her violent plot elements, and her religious world view. O'Connor was a Roman Catholic writer who knew that most of her audience did not share her strict moral view of the world. She sought, however, to present a message of God's grace and presence in everyday life. Born in the "Bible Belt" Southern city of Savannah, Georgia, on March 25, 1925, O'Connor's region and upbringing influenced her fiction in her depiction of character, of conflict, and in her choice of themes.

O'Connor was the only child of wealthy parents and attended high school in Milledgeville, Georgia. Her father, Edward Francis O'Connor, died when she was sixteen from degenerative lupus, the same disease...