The Grotesque in Flannery O’Connor Flannery O’Connor, a prolific Southern author, was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1925 during the Great Depression. After her father’s death from lupus when O’Connor was fifteen, she and her mother moved to Andulusia, a rural quail farm outside of Milledgeville, Georgia. O’Connor herself was diagnosed with lupus at the age of twenty-five and suffered greatly from the disease which finally killed her. She was educated in parochial Catholic schools where she learned the basics of literature and grammar. O’Connor began writing at the young age of ten,