Flannery O'Connor

Lupus killed her father when she was fifteen; the same disease was diagnosed in her at twenty-six, not long after she'd left the Iowa Writers' Workshop for a stint in New York. She returned home to her mother's dairy farm outside Milledgeville, Georgia, expecting to die within five years and living, cortisone-dependent and increasingly crutch-bound, for twelve more.

On the farm she called Andalusia she raised dozens of peacocks and wrote in the mornings before the steroids exhausted her, producing two novels and thirty-two stories that read like theology staged as violence. She was also a prodigious letter-writer; her correspondence, published posthumously as The Habit of Being, is as sharp as the fiction.

Abdominal surgery in early 1964 reactivated the lupus, and she died that August at thirty-nine.