Everything That Rises Must Converge

Mary Flannery O’Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, on March 25, 1925. She was the only child in an Irish-Catholic family and remained devoutly religious throughout her life. O’Connor graduated from the Georgia State College for Women in 1945 and was accepted to the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In Iowa, she often felt out of place; most of her classmates were men, and she was teased for her thick Southern accent. Her professors, however, recognized her potential, and O’Connor graduated with her MFA in writing in 1947. She moved to New York, where she worked on her first novel. However, O’Connor’s health was failing, and in 1950, at just 25 years old, she was diagnosed with lupus, an autoimmune disease that had killed her father. The diagnosis forced O’Connor to return to the family dairy farm to live with her mother, where she would spend the rest of her life. Isolated on the farm, O’Connor dedicated herself to writing, and her first novel, Wise Blood, was published in 1952. Neither Wise Blood nor O’Connor’s second novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1964), was celebrated by critics. However, her short fiction, particularly the story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (1955), established her as a great American writer.