Flannery O’Connor was born on March 25, 1925, in Savannah, Georgia and died on August 3, 1964, at the age of thirty-nine of a disease called lupus. She attended college at what is today the University of Iowa where she received her master’s degree. O’Connor was believed to be one of the best short story writers of her time. She wrote thirty-two short stories as well as two novels. A few of her well-known short stories include: “Everything That Rises Must Converge”, “The Train”, and “The River”. Flannery, spending most of her life in the South, was a Southern writer who often relied heavily on Southern Gothic writing style and regional settings to add much deeper meaning to her stories. This style was fitting to the South because, “the plantation world of the antebellum period provided writers with an …show more content…
Many of her stories contain characters with fatal faults. This produced a much deeper meaning to the story then what meets the eye. O’Connor was faced with many hardships throughout her writing career: her father’s death caused by the disease lupus, followed years later by herself contracting the same deadly disease that also resulted in her death. Nevertheless, despite her struggles she still managed to produce some of the most award wining and well-known short stories in history. Through Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge”, “The River”, and “The Train” her ability to write such graphic yet gripping stories with characters struggling to adapt to their understandings of new found religious beliefs, their society’s new views of racial equality, and their inability to analyze an unfamiliar situation is stunningly displayed. Despite her many life struggles O’Connor was still able to write these stories, which dubbed her as one of the greatest short story writers of all