An engaging and authoritative biography of Flannery O'Connor, who despite the chronic disease that eventually confined her to her mother's farm in Georgia, managed to fundamentally change the landscape of American literature with her fierce, sometimes comic novels and stories.

Written between 1946 and 1947, while O'Connor was a student far from home at the University of Iowa, this spiritual journal was only recently discovered. It provides a rare portal into the interior life of a great writer, and is a record of a young woman's cry from the heart for love, grace, and art.