American · 1925–1964
Flannery O'Connor packed more violence into thirty-nine years than most writers manage in twice that span. The Georgia-born Catholic wrote stories and novels where grace arrives through car accidents, serial killers, and stolen wooden legs. "The Complete Stories" won the National Book Award posthumously in 1972, cementing her reputation as the master of Southern Gothic. Lupus confined her to her mother's dairy farm for her final decade; she raised peacocks and wrote fiction that insisted on the reality of spiritual stakes in a secular age.