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Flannery O'Connor, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find"

BIOGRAPHY

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[From The Norton Introduction to Literature]

(1925–1964)

Mary Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, studied at the Georgia State College for Women, and won a fellowship to the Writer's Workshop of the University of Iowa, from which she received her MFA.In 1950, she was first diagnosed with lupus, a painful autoimmune disorder that had killed her father and would trouble her for the rest of her brief life.Her first novel, Wise Blood, was published in 1952, and her first collection of stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, in 1955. She was able to complete only one more novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960), and a second collection of stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965), before dying of lupus, in Milledgeville, Georgia. Her posthumously published Complete Stories won the National Book Award in 1972. A collection of letters, edited by Sally Fitzgerald under the title The Habit of Being, appeared in 1979.

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In The Portable Intro to Literature
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