Mary Flannery O'Connor was born on March twenty-fifth, 1925, in the southern city of Savannah, Georgia. The year she was born, her father developed a rare disease called lupus （狼疮）. He died of the disease in
1941. By that time the family was living in the small southern town of Milledgeville, Georgia, in a house owned by Flannery's mother.
Life in a small town in the American South was what O'Connor knew best. Yet she said, "If you know who you are, you can go anywhere. Many people in the town of Milledgeville thought she was different from other girls. She was kind to everyone, but she seemed to stand to one side of what was happening, as if she wanted to see it better. Her mother was her example. Her mother said, "I was brought up to be nice to everyone and not to tell my business to anyone.
Flannery also did not talk about herself. But in her writing a silent and distant anger explodes from the quiet surface of her stories. Some see her as a Roman Catholic （天主教的） religious writer. They see her anger as the search to save her moral being through her belief in Jesus Christ. Some see her not writing about things, but presenting the things themselves. She said, "I see the world from the perspective of Christianity. This means that for me, the meaning of life is focused on Christ's redemption （救赎） of us, and everything in the world is related to it in my eyes. " The following year, 1949, she moved to New York City. She soon left the city and lived with her friend Robert Fitzgerald and his family in the northeastern state of Connecticut. Fitzgerald says O'Connor needed to be alone to work during the day. And she needed her friends to talk to when her work was done.
While writing her first novel, Wise Blood, she was stricken with the disease lupus that had killed her father. The treatment for lupus weakened her. She moved back to Georgia and lived the rest of her life with her mother on a farm outside Milledgeville.
