SOURCE: O'Gorman, Farrell. “The Angelic Artist in the Fiction of Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy.” Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature 53, no. 1 (fall 2000): 61-79

In the following essay, O'Gorman analyzes O'Connor's and fellow southern-Catholic writer Walker Percy's “satirical portraits of the twentieth-century romantic artist—portraits that entirely fuel several of O'Connor's short stories.”

Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy have been briefly linked in a number of articles exploring their affinities as Catholic authors of the American South. But their relationship deserves further consideration in light of their common immersion in a vibrant postwar Catholic intellectual milieu, one which had its roots in Europe but strongly impacted the United States. O'Connor and Percy alike first came to their mature, intellectually informed faith and literary vision in the “Age of Anxiety” largely by drawing on the work of thinkers such as Jacques Maritain, Gabriel Marcel, and Romano Guardini. Maritain—the...