American short-story writer and novelist whose Southern Gothic fiction, written from her mother's dairy farm in Milledgeville, Georgia during the fourteen years of a lupus illness that would kill her at 39, is as theologically serious as anything produced in 20th-century American letters. O'Connor wrote explicitly as a Catholic writer for what she called "a hostile audience" — a secular modernity that had lost the religious vocabulary her stories presupposed — and she cultivated a violent, grotesque, comic style to cut through that hostility.
Her 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 (1965, posthumous), make up a small but dense body of work. Her characters — backwoods prophets, complacent matrons, self-important intellectuals, dangerous children — meet grace most often as a violent intrusion, a shotgun blast or a stroke that strips away whatever they had been relying on as spiritual substitute. "For the hard of hearing you shout," she wrote, "and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures."
Her essays and letters, collected in Mystery and Manners (1969) and The Habit of Being (1979), display a mind of unusual toughness and range. She corresponded widely — with Walker Percy, with Caroline Gordon, with the priests and philosophers who interested her — and read the theology she cared about (Aquinas every night) as seriously as she read fiction. Robert Coles's Flannery O'Connor's South (1980) is a fine study. She remains a writer whose particular combination of theological seriousness, comic violence, and stylistic precision has no close peer.