Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925. When she died at the age of thirty-nine, America lost one of its most gifted writers at the height of her powers. O’Connor wrote two novels,
Wise Blood (1952) and
The Violent Bear It Away (1960), and two story collections,
A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and
Everything That Rises Must Converge (1964). Her
Complete Stories, published posthumously in 1972, won the National Book Award that year, and in a 2009 online poll it was voted as the best book to have won the award in the contest’s 60-year history. Her essays were published in
Mystery and Manners (1969) and her letters in
The Habit of Being (1979). In 1988 the Library of America published her
Collected Works; she was the first postwar writer to be so honored. O’Connor was educated at the Georgia State College for Women, studied writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and wrote much of
Wise Blood at the Yaddo artists’ colony in upstate New York. She lived most of her adult life on her family’s ancestral farm, Andalusia, outside Milledgeville, Georgia.
Robert Giroux is the editor of two collections of Elizabeth Bishop's writing, both published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux: The Collected Prose and One Art: Letters.
