In 1940 O'Connor's father died, and she and her mother moved to her mother's family farm, Andalusia. O'Connor attended Peabody High School, where she contributed drawings and articles to the school newspaper and submitted short stories to literary journals. In 1938, the O'Connor family moved to Milledgeville, her mother's hometown, after her father showed symptoms of lupus.
From an early age O'Connor, a shy and quiet girl, had literary aspirations, which were encouraged by her father at the age of six she began writing and illustrating her own stories. Her father was a realtor who had once had literary ambitions, and her mother came from a prominent Georgia political family. Mary Flannery O'Connor was born in 1925 in Savannah, Georgia, the only child of a middle-class Catholic family.
But, to some extent because of O'Connor's reputation as a master of the short story, the novel is now considered an important work in the Gothic tradition and acknowledged to be O'Connor's best work of longer fiction. The novel was not particularly well received when it first appeared many critics found it strange and impenetrable. Her only other novel, Wise Blood (1952), fuses humor and horror to examine questions of faith, suffering, family relationships, and intellectual versus religious understanding. Her last major work to be published in her lifetime, The Violent Bear It Away contains elements found in much of O'Connor's fiction. O'Connor wrote the novel over eight years while suffering from lupus, publishing the first chapter as a story, "You Can't Be Poorer Than Dead," in 1955. Stark religious symbolism and Biblical allusions unite to explore themes of spiritual hunger, faith versus reason, and the battle for the soul. It is not, as might be expected, a parody of religious fanaticism, but a psychological study of the mysterious, frightening, and sometimes offensive nature of the religious calling. The novel is unsettling because it offers no easy truths its hero is an unlikable boy who learns that doing God's work entails violence, unreason, even madness. O'Connor paints a macabre picture of Southern life and religious fundamentalism and parodies the blind self-assurances of modern secular thinking. Tarwater travels to the city, where he struggles against the need to deny his spiritual inheritance and the call of God. It charts the spiritual and physical journey of fourteen-year-old Francis Marion Tarwater, raised by his great-uncle in the backwoods of Alabama to be a prophet. The Violent Bear It Away, published in New York in 1960, is Flannery O'Connor's darkly humorous Gothic novel about a Southern boy's spiritual awakening.
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