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Mary Flannery O’Connor was born in 1925 in Savannah, Georgia, and she is considered one of the most important short story writers of the mid-20th century. She died in 1964 at age 39, but during her short life she was celebrated and lauded for her work. O’Connor suffered from lupus during the latter part of her life, which often made her physically weak and eventually led to her death. Her work is characterized by an unflinching attitude toward human frailty, with which she was intimately familiar, and is often focused on damaged people trying to make the best of what they have been given, even if that means wronging others in the process through violence or cruelty.

Often characterized as a “Southern Gothic” writer for her dark themes and regular inclusion of violence, O’Connor thought of herself as a Catholic writer. As a devout Catholic in the primarily Protestant South, she incorporated that sense of displacement and alienation into her works. While she often created wrongheaded or hypocritical characters, she was uninterested in making fun of the poor or uneducated. Rather, she gave these characters room to learn and grow, and to even occasionally succeed over those who would take advantage of them. However, just as often, there were no unambiguous heroes in her stories. She appreciated the full spectrum of human behavior and was careful not to be didactic in her writing, even while driving home a particular point.

O’Connor published two novels: Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away. Her short stories, however, are the works that are most celebrated. Her two most famous stories, “Everything That Rises Must Converge” and “A Good Man is Hard to Find” are stories with flawed protagonists, sheltered people wanting to believe themselves to be fundamentally good but butting up against their own limitations and the unknown complications of the world in which they live.

These flaws are present in her own life, as her personal letters are riddled with racist epithets and dismissals of Black intellectuals of the time, such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and James Baldwin. Her life is a prime example of the disadvantages she wrote about in her stories. She struggled and overcame her own physical limitations with her intellect, creating work that remains brilliant and strange and has been dissected into the 21st century, but she was also a woman who was incapable of overcoming the narrow outlook she was born into, reifying the prejudices that surrounded her. O’Connor must be considered a giant of the American short story canon, but she must also be understood as a complicated figure, as flawed and complex a character as any she created.

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