Fiction operates through the senses and I think one reason that people
             find it so difficult to write stories is that they forget how much time
             and patience is required to convince through the senses."
             BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAYMore than thirty years after her death at age thirty-nine,
             Flannery O'Connor is considered one of the great writers of the twentieth
             century. Although she wrote just two short novels and about thirty stories,
             O'Connor's originality set her fiction apart. A Roman Catholic who was
             born and raised in the Protestant South, O'Connor wrote mostly about poor,
             white Southerners undergoing struggles of faith and belief. Always present
             in her stories is a dual sense of evil and divinity, capturing both the
             reality of human weakness and the redemptive power of God's grace. O'Connor'
             s stories, written in simple, unadorned language, portray conflicts experienced
             by bizarre, strange, and often deformed characters.
             O'Connor was born on March 25, 1925, in Savannah, Georgia, the daughter
             of Edward Francis O'Connor, a real estate broker, and Regina Cline O'Connor.
             She lived in the city until she was thirteen when her parents moved to
             Milledgeville, a small farming town. A few years later, her father died
             of a disease of the immune system known as lupus erythematosus. After graduating
             from Peabody High School in 1942, O'Connor attended Georgia State College
             for Women, where she drew illustrations for the school newspaper and yearbook
             and edited The Corinthian, a literary magazine. After graduating from Georgia
             State (now Georgia College) in 1945, she won a fellowship to the University
             of Iowa Writers' Workshop in Iowa City. Her first short story, "The Geranium,"
             was published in 1946, the year before she graduated from Iowa with a masters
             of fine arts degree. From 1948 to 1949 she lived at Yaddo, a writers colony
             located in Saratoga Springs, New York.
             In the fall of 1949 O'Connor mo...