Flannery O''Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, the only child of a Catholic family. The region was part of the ''Christ-haunted'' Bible belt of the Southern States. The spiritual heritage of the region shaped profoundly O''Connor''s writing as described in her essay. O''Connor''s father, Edward F. O''Connor, was a realtor owner he worked later for a construction company and died in 1941. Her mother, Regina L. (Cline) O''Connor, came from a prominent family in the state - her father has been a mayor of Milledgeville for many years. When O''Connor was 12, her family moved from Millegeville, her mother''s birthplace. She attended Peabody High School and enrolled in Georgia State College for Women. At school she edited the college magazine and graduated in 1945 with an A.B. O''Connor then continued her studies at the University of Iowa, where she attended writer''s workshop conducted by Paul Engle. At the age of 21 she published her first short story. ''The Geranium'' , in Accent. In the following year she received the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Literature. In 1947 she lived for seven months at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, New York, an estate left by the Trask family for writers, painters and musicians. In O''Connor''s short stories, the classic plot lines involves some & amp;amp;quot;come un-Christian person who undergoes a terrible and shattering experience that may even kill him, and at the same time moment has an insight into his own selfishness or vanity or deludedness or greed that has warped his sould all along, but has never been achknowledge. As the Misfit says of the Grandmother in one of O''Connors best-known stories & amp;amp;quot;A Good Man Is Hard To Find, & amp;amp;quot; & amp;amp;quot;She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody thee to shoot her every minute of her life. & amp;amp;quot; It is usually clear to the reader what the failing of the character is, and uncomfortablely so, for these are not really evil figures; most unconsciously racist than crazed with Hilterian lust for genocide, more smug than vicious. O''Connor is different, and she is si because of what she herself called her peculiar & amp;amp;quot;vision, & amp;amp;quot; that held the same priorities always uppermost and saw that insofar as other did not do so, insofar as they had things other than Christ central in their lives, they were, in her world, & amp;amp;quot;grotesque. & amp;amp;quot; The difficulty for her as a Catholic werite was to communicate that vision to an audience that saw the same sort of person as perfectly normal. For this reason she ran to the extreme situation or character, to the shatterining and violent climaxes that would strike a person as Saul was struck on the road to Damascus. O''Connor''s social concerns overlap with theme and character extensively. Her idea was to hold up a mirror to society, expecially white Southern society, and reveal itself as grosteque in all the ways she thought it was. Her intent, in the short run, could be called social justice, but in the long run she felt even more than that was at stake. In 1950 O''Connor suffered her first attack from disseminated lupus, a debilitating blood disease that had killed her father. She returned to Milledgeville wheer she lived with her mother on a dairy farm. In spite of the illiness, O''Connor continued to write and occasionally she lectured about creative writing in colleges. & amp;amp;quot;I write every day for a least two hours, & amp;amp;quot; she said in an interview in 1952, & amp;amp;quot;and I spend the rest of my time largely in society of ducks. & amp;amp;quot; From around 1955 O''Connor was forced to use crutches. An abdominal operation reactivated the lupus and O''Connor died on August 3, 1964 at the young age of 39.