The name Flannery O'Connor has become synonymous with Southern literature. Her characters are good country people and lowly misfits who speak with rich Southern accents, and no matter how misguided their actions, they are never beyond redemption. In an essay entitled "The Catholic Novelist in the South," O'Connor, an orthodox Catholic, wrote that the "two circumstances that have given character to [her] own writing have been those of being Southern and being Catholic." Her remarkable fictional landscape—a "Christ-haunted" place of backwoods preachers, mad prophets, and moonshine visionaries—signifies the intimate relation that exists between Flannery O'Connor's art and the dynamics of the Southern culture that brought her art to life.

Born in Savannah, Georgia, on March 25, 1925, Flannery O'Connor was the only child of Regina Cline and Edward Francis O'Connor, Jr. Raised in her mother's family home in Milledgeville, Georgia...