She wrote only two novels and thirty-one short stories before her life was tragically cut short by disease at age 39. Yet, from this meager body of work, Flannery O’Connor became one of the pre-eminent voices of modern American literature and an inspiration to generations of writers who came after her. Today her writings, like those of William Faulkner and other authors in the Southern tradition, are being rediscovered by a whole new generation of readers.

She was born Mary Flannery O’Connor on March 25, 1925 in Savannah, Ga., the only child of Edward and Regina O’Connor. They were devout Roman Catholics in a region of the country renowned for its fundamentalist beliefs, Bible belt evangelism, and protestant heritage. When Flannery was twelve, her father, a Federal Housing Authority real estate appraiser, was diagnosed with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE), a hereditary blood disorder that attacks the body’s auto-immune system. In 1940, the family moved from Savannah to her mother’s ancestral home on Greene Street in Milledgeville, Ga. There her father died the following year. His death so devastated her, that for the rest of her life she seldom spoke of him.

While living in Milledgeville, O’Connor attended Peabody High School and later became editor of her college magazine at Georgia State College for Women. She published her first short story at age 21. In 1945, she left Milledgeville to study at the University of Iowa, where she attended the prestigious Iowa Writer’s Workshop and earned her Master of Fine Arts degree in 1947. After graduation, she began working on her first novel Wise Blood. She moved to New York City, then later to Ridgefield, Conn., where she lived with friends while she continued to write.

But in 1950, O’Connor began exhibiting the same symptoms of the Lupus Erythematosus that had killed her father. Devastated by her diagnosis and with her future now uncertain, she returned to Milledgeville and settled in at Andalusia, the sprawling 200-acre family farm famously populated by animals, exotic birds, and the peafowl that often were written into her stories. The farm was the perfect remedy, giving her not just a physical landscape to live in, but one to use as the rural setting in which to set the fiction she then began writing in earnest.

But hospitalization, frequent doctor’s visits, and a dependence on crutches inevitably followed. Despite her failing health, the last decade of her life was an intensely productive period. She published Wise Blood in 1952, then pumped out a highly acclaimed collection of short stories, including her most read and anthologized work, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955). This was followed by another novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960) and a second collection of short stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge. She also continued to write reviews and commentaries for magazines, and she traveled extensively to maintain a busy speaking schedule.

While she chose the rural South as the setting for her stories, it is the religious landscape of the region—that curious mix of fiery Bible belt fundamentalism, sin, and repentance—that figures most prominently in her work. Like author Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor was not just Catholic, but deeply spiritual and introspective. Her writing drew from her Catholic roots, work that is deeply informed by the sacramental, a blended Christian prose heavily imbued with the Thomist notion that God is everywhere in the created world. Nowhere does her writing approach the sort of apologetic fiction that was so popular in the Catholic literature of her day. She explained simply, “A writer’s meaning must be evident in his or her fiction without didacticism.” She wrote dark, often painful, violent, and disturbing fiction involving grotesque or stereotyped characters, usually fundamental Protestants as they might be touched by divine grace under the worst of human circumstances. Race often looms in the background, with characters limited in perception and gravely unaware of some awful fate awaiting them just ahead.

But Christian faith was not O’Connor’s sole literary focus. Her work also bears witness to a familiarity with the most pressing and sensitive contemporary issues of her day. As she neared the end of her life, her work increasingly reflected a deeper concern for matters of race and human dignity. She even touched on the Holocaust in her famous story, The Displaced Person and on the subject of integration in Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965).

Even as O’Connor’s health worsened, she tried to maintain a busy schedule, continuing to write and travel and lecture without pause. But failing health ultimately confined her to her beloved Georgia home. On Aug. 3, 1964, she died at the age of 39 from complications of Lupus.

In the years following her death, her popularity waned. Recently, however, contemporary culture has begun looking backward to find the more meaningful works of earlier writers who speak the language of universal human truth through their fiction. Flannery O’Connor’s work does this in abundance. Today, her stories and novels are again being reprinted in record numbers, and her writings are enjoying renewed popularity among a whole new generation of readers.

Stephen Enzweiler is contributing editor to Y’all Magazine and is a short story fiction author. Learn more about this writer at www.StephenEnzweiler.com