She has had such an influence on writing that there is now the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, an award given to short story writers. Flannery O'Connor won the Rinehart-Iowa Fiction Prize in 1947, for her novel Wise Blood. Although she received numerous awards for her short stories, she wrote more essays, lectures, and letters that broadened her readership and allowed the world to better understand the mind of Flannery O'Connor. She was a dedicated writer who forced herself to write every day, whether it was a paragraph or a couple of pages. Even when she got sick, she still forced herself to write, which shows us how dedicated she was to it