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The Violent Bear It Away Author Biography

Mary Flannery O'Connor was born in 1925 in Savannah, Georgia, the only child of a middle-class Catholic family. Her father was a realtor who had once had literary ambitions, and her mother came from a prominent Georgia political family. From an early age O'Connor, a shy and quiet girl, had literary aspirations, which were encouraged by her father; at the age of six she began writing and illustrating her own stories. In 1938, the O'Connor family to move to Milledgeville, her mother's hometown, after her father showed symptoms of lupus. O'Connor attended Peabody High School, where she contributed drawings and articles to the school newspaper and submitted short stories to literary journals.

In 1940 O'Connor's father died, and she and her mother moved to her mother's family farm, Andalusia. After graduating in 1945 from the Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College), where she edited the college...
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