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Flannery O'Connor
1925–1964
Born Savannah, Georgia
Mary Flannery O'Connor dropped her first name when she published Wise Blood (1952). Shortly thereafter, she earned her master's degree in creative writing at the University of Iowa. Her first collection of stories was A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955); her second, Everything That Rises Must Converge, was published posthumously in 1965. Most of O'Connor's novels and short stories focused on spiritual and religious journeys taken by morally compromised individuals placed in unsettling scenarios. "I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace," she once explained. "Their heads are so hard that almost nothing else will work."
This portrait of the author by the Atlanta-based photographer Joseph Reshower appeared on the book jacket for O'Connor's The Complete Stories. Published several years after her death, the anthology received the National Book Award in 1972.
Joseph Reshower (1921–2006)
Gelatin silver print, 1961
Acquired through a partial gift by John Daniel Reaves |