Flannery is from the Irish surname Ó Flannghaile — flann (red) + gal (valor). **Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)** — the **American Southern Gothic novelist and short-story writer whose *Wise Blood* (1952), *A Good Man Is Hard to Find* (1955), and *The Violent Bear It Away* (1960) defined a uniquely Catholic, grotesque, and theological strain of mid-century American fiction**. **Diagnosed with lupus at 25 (the same disease that killed her father), she lived and wrote for fourteen more years on her mother's farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she raised peacocks**. **Posthumous National Book Award (1972) for her Complete Stories**.
Subject of Brad Gooch's *Flannery: A Life* (2009).
Flannery reduces to six — the number of Southern Gothic master.