One of the most influential and enduring Catholic writers in America remains Flannery O’Connor. Today is her birthday. And, over at Busted Halo, a writer has taken a pilgrimage to her fabled Georgia homestead Andalusia:

You’ll find her along the fence line of Memory Hill Cemetery, to the left. The grave sits in a family plot. There are Treanors and Clines—relations of her mother’s—and then, finally at the edge, O’Connors. A low, flat, plain marble gravestone, next to two just like it belonging to her parents. The etching, too, is plain: a cross, trimmed with “IHS,” and beneath it her full Christian name, Mary Flannery O’Connor, the day she died (August 3, 1964), and the day, only 39 years earlier, when she was born: March 25, 1925.

It was tempting, when I was a pilgrim in Flannery O’Connor’s hometown, to think of what might have been for her. And it is tempting now, on her birthday. Lupus, the same disease that claimed her father, hobbled her then took her life long before she had tested the limits of her genius. Today, she would have been 83—six years younger than Doris Lessing, who won this year’s Nobel Prize and is still writing.

But what O’Connor left behind remains vibrantly alive. Two gawky, if brilliant, novels, and two collections of nearly immaculate short stories that dig into the deepest spiritual truths. A posthumous collection of essays, Mystery and Manners, that remains required reading for any aspiring, or established, Catholic writer. And an anthology of her correspondences, The Habit of Being, which is hilarious and humane, and one of the most entertaining documentations of Southern life in twentieth-century American literature.

Milledgeville, Georgia is a town of about 16,000, two hours southeast of Atlanta. It’s where O’Connor lived, mastered her craft, died and is buried. The town remains a Flannery kind of place, slightly grotesque in that rural Georgia way that courses through her works (and that was shed long ago by larger cities like Atlanta and Augusta, where I live). Oddities abound, of a peculiarly Southern hue—tiny churches poke through the woods on the edges of town, and advertisements line the roads for psychics and an exterminator business called Bug House.

Up Columbia Road a few miles from the cemetery is the library of Georgia College and State University. Flannery went to school here, when it was still called Georgia State College for Women. A party was thrown for her in this library upon the 1950 publication of Wise Blood, her first novel. Today it holds many of her original manuscripts under lock and key, available only to scholars who give at least a week’s notice. On public display, they keep a few of her most important possessions: a grand typewriter (kept under glass) where she wrote and re-wrote; her baptismal gown; books she owned by Faulkner and works of Christian apologetics.

The walls in the exhibition room are lined with her citations, mostly Literary Achievement Awards from the Georgia Writers’ Association. One from 1960 praises her second novel, The Violent Bear It Away, for its portrayal of “Christ and the sacraments, including…the bread and wine of Communion”—an innocuously Protestant statement that must have drawn one of her typically wry pronouncements. This, after all, was a woman fiercely devoted to the Catholic understanding of the Eucharist. “If it’s a symbol,” she once quipped, “I say to hell with it.”

Further north, Columbia Road becomes U.S. 441 and the strip malls fan out on both sides of the highway. On the left side up a hill is Andalusia, Flannery’s home, which sits back along an unpaved road away from the ugly commotion. Pulling up the driveway, it’s easy to imagine the amusement O’Connor would have felt today, knowing she lived across the street from an America’s Best Value Inn, and next door to a Wal-Mart.

You’ll want to read the rest, and see what else the author discovered.