In the following essay, Zornado explores the relationship between O'Connor's Roman Catholic faith and her art and finds parallels between her literary sensibilities and those of Thomas Merton.

In the following essay, Zornado explores the relationship between O'Connor's Roman Catholic faith and her art and finds parallels between her literary sensibilities and those of Thomas Merton.

In the following essay, Raiger explores O'Connor's use of modern forms, particularly the grotesque and the sublime, in her short fiction.

In the following essay, Schaum examines the archetype of the trickster in O'Connor's short fiction and argues that she provides, through this archetype, a multi-faceted caricature of Lucifer.

In the following essay, Kinney considers the role of grace in O'Connor's fiction.

In the following essay, Kinney considers the role of grace in O'Connor's fiction.

In the following essay, Babinec examines mother-daughter relationships in O'Connor's fiction from a feminist perspective.

In the following essay, Babinec examines mother-daughter relationships in O'Connor's fiction from a feminist perspective.

In the following essay, Carroll asserts that repressed memories of crisis surface through the unconscious in “The Displaced Person.”

In the following essay, Carroll asserts that repressed memories of crisis surface through the unconscious in “The Displaced Person.”

In the following essay, Bolton examines the relationship between vision and the violence experienced by the characters in “The Displaced Person.”

In the following essay, Gilbert investigates the way in which O'Connor's illness informs her last collection of short fiction, Everything That Rises Must Converge.

In the following essay, Prunty investigates the role of vacancy in the stories of Peter Taylor and O'Connor.

In the following essay, Coulthard considers sin and redemption in four of O'Connor's short stories: “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” “The Artificial Nigger,” “Revelation,” and “Parker's Back.”

In the following essay, Coulthard considers sin and redemption in four of O'Connor's short stories: “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” “The Artificial Nigger,” “Revelation,” and “Parker's Back.”

In the following essay, Beringer elucidates the mother-child relationship in three O'Connor short stories: “The Enduring Chill,” “Greenleaf,” and “Good Country People.”

In the following essay, Beringer elucidates the mother-child relationship in three O'Connor short stories: “The Enduring Chill,” “Greenleaf,” and “Good Country People.”

In the following essay, Beringer considers the depiction of working mothers in three of O'Connor's short works.

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.”

[No] reader can fail to discern the permanence and seriousness of [O'Connor's] religious concerns. Fall and redemption, nature and grace, sin and innocence—every one of her stories and novels revolves around these traditional Christian themes. It is hardly surprising that O'Connor should have acknowledged close affinities with Hawthorne. Her fiction is of a coarser fabric than his, less delicately shaded in its artistry and far less muted in its effects, but it belongs without an...

In the following essay, Cook offers a thematic and stylistic analysis of Wise Blood.

In the following essay, Klug maintains that O'Connor's negative attitude towards modernism and the modern writer “sets her at odds with the whole tradition of American fiction in this century and with the type of spiritual hero which that tradition has produced.”

In the following essay, Klug maintains that O'Connor's negative attitude towards modernism and the modern writer “sets her at odds with the whole tradition of American fiction in this century and with the type of spiritual hero which that tradition has produced.”

In the following essay, Oliver analyzes O'Connor's unique sense of compassion in “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” “The Artificial Nigger,” “Parker's Back,” and “Judgment Day.”

In the following essay, Oliver analyzes O'Connor's unique sense of compassion in “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” “The Artificial Nigger,” “Parker's Back,” and “Judgment Day.”

In the following essay, Als considers the defining characteristics of O'Connor's fiction.

In the following essay, Als considers the defining characteristics of O'Connor's fiction.

In the following essay, Clasby offers a Jungian reading of “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.”

In the following essay, Clasby offers a Jungian reading of “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.”

In the following essay, Renner suggests a secular interpretation of the conclusion of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.”

In the following essay, Spivey encourages various critical perspectives on O'Connor's work, contending that relying on only one will result in a limited and one-sided view of her fiction.

In the following essay, Spivey encourages various critical perspectives on O'Connor's work, contending that relying on only one will result in a limited and one-sided view of her fiction.

In the following essay, Garson regards the theme of parents and children as an important one in O'Connor's fiction.

In the following essay, Garson regards the theme of parents and children as an important one in O'Connor's fiction.

In the following essay, Desmond investigates O'Connor's view of the modern idolatrous mind through an analysis of her story “An Artificial Nigger.”

In the following essay, Desmond investigates O'Connor's view of the modern idolatrous mind through an analysis of her story “An Artificial Nigger.”

In the following essay, Russell maintains that O'Connor's ideas about race were profoundly influenced by her Catholic faith.

In the following essay, Russell maintains that O'Connor's ideas about race were profoundly influenced by her Catholic faith.

In the following essay, Byars underscores the importance of prophecy in O'Connor's work and asserts that “in a real sense her fiction is a form of prophecy, both revelatory and admonitory, telling a modern secularized world of the presence of grace and the imminence of judgment.”

In the following essay, Byars underscores the importance of prophecy in O'Connor's work and asserts that “in a real sense her fiction is a form of prophecy, both revelatory and admonitory, telling a modern secularized world of the presence of grace and the imminence of judgment.”

In the following essay, Desmond examines the role of historicism and the aesthetic of memory in O'Connor's work.

In the following essay, Desmond examines the role of historicism and the aesthetic of memory in O'Connor's work.

The fiction of the late Flannery O'Connor … poses a unique problem. Unlike some contemporary Christian writers, she makes no concessions to the non-Christian world: on the whole, she refuses to make her ideology palatable to non-Christian readers by suggesting any philosophical frame of reference other than that of Christian orthodoxy. And today this is an extremely big risk to take: such a theme and such methods inevitably deny the Christian writer many readers. Significantly, many of those s...

In the following essay, Napier evaluates O'Connor's literary output in the last few years of her life, focusing on the achievement of her last three stories: “Revelation,” “Judgment Day,” and “Parker's Back.”

In the following essay, Napier evaluates O'Connor's literary output in the last few years of her life, focusing on the achievement of her last three stories: “Revelation,” “Judgment Day,” and “Parker's Back.”

[What Miss O'Connor wrote] about might be comprehended by the word "mystery." "There are two qualities that make fiction," she was fond of saying: "One is the sense of mystery and the other is the sense of manners. You get the manners from the texture of experience that surrounds you"; the sense of mystery is the writer's own. [Mystery] for Miss O'Connor, a Roman Catholic,… centered upon the three basic theological doctrines of the Church...

In the following essay, Brewer asserts that O'Connor's use of Christ and Satan symbolism in her work proves her thorough understanding of Southern Protestantism.

In the following essay, Brewer asserts that O'Connor's use of Christ and Satan symbolism in her work proves her thorough understanding of Southern Protestantism.

In the following essay, Walters views O'Connor's fiction from a feminist perspective in order to examine the relationship between violence and comedy in her work.

In the following essay, Walters views O'Connor's fiction from a feminist perspective in order to examine the relationship between violence and comedy in her work.

[Flannery O'Connor] brought a vision as accurate and piercing as any Old Testament prophet; and her work, like the prophets', was aimed at quickening the conscience and calling an estranged people to the tragic glory of God's chosen…. In the fiction of Flannery O'Connor one finds a … preoccupation with the woes and evils of a decaying civilization—a civilization in which the law and fervor and even fanaticism of the backwoods prophets test the metal of the pr...

In the following essay, Owens contends that the grandmother's attachment of excessive significance to signatures in O'Connor's short story is a sign of her adherence to an archaic value system in the face of sweeping social change.

In the following essay, Shaw utilizes Michael Polanyi's theological work in order to provide a religious interpretation of O'Connor's short fiction.

In the following essay, Ochshorn explores the contradictions between readers' interpretations of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and O'Connor's intentions regarding the story.

The promotion of The Violent Bear It Away, Flannery O'Connor's second novel, plus the recent promotion of her career indicate that she is being groomed as A Current Great Writer…. Where she has succeeded and how raise several questions in both literature and public relations. At an increasing rate since World War II judgment has dwindled in literary criticism, academic and non-academic, and prestige in letters has come proportionately to rest on personality. As with Hollywood figures, w...

She was a girl who started with a gift for cartooning and satire, and found in herself a far greater gift, unique in her time and place, a marvel. She kept going deeper (this is a phrase she used) until making up stories became, for her, a way of testing and defining and conveying that superior knowledge that must be called religious. It must be called religious but with no false note in our voices, because her writing will make any false note that is applied to it very clear indeed. Bearing hard upon motiv...

[The] shocking or violent incidents in [Flannery O'Connor's] stories strike chords that reverberate loudly and lengthily regardless of a reader's own bias. In most of O'Connor's major stories, these moments of violence or death occur on or near the last page: the Misfit shoots the Grandmother, Sheppard discovers Norton's body, Julian's mother dies on the pavement, Mr. Guizac is run over by a tractor, Hazel Motes is found in a ditch. But not all of O'Co...

Flannery O'Connor's preoccupation with the spiritual condition of modern man … led her to write fiction of a peculiar cast, but her religious concerns fortified rather than weakened the artistic integrity of her creations. (pp. 9-10) Her fiction abounds in grotesque situations and many of her most memorable characters are driven, "possessed" individuals. Freaks, fanatics, and psychopaths stalk the unfriendly streets and desolate clay roads of her fictional world, which oft...

At her death in 1964, Flannery O'Connor left two novels and nineteen short stories and on these her literary reputation finally must rest. The novels, however, are not finished works of art. Both are structurally imperfect, but, of more importance, the very devices and perceptions that are the hallmarks of Flannery O'Connor's skill as a short story writer wear thin and brittle in the larger ambiance of a book-length work. The incisive dialogue loses some of its sharpness: detail and ges...

To even the casual reader it would appear that Miss O'Connor really had only one story to tell and really only one main character. This principal character is, of course, Jesus Christ; and her one story is man's absolutely crucial encounter with Him—an encounter so crucial that it is literally a matter, quite often, of life-or-death, Heaven-or-Hell. There is, furthermore, very little about her Savior that seems comfortable and even less that is sweet, in the invidious sense of that word...

[In "The Enduring Chill"] four explicit references to Joyce are only the most obvious of an elaborate series of correspondences between Asbury Porter Fox and the Stephen Dedalus of both Portrait and Ulysses: correspondences involving not only major events and images but even details of diction and syntax and providing the basis for a sharply satiric portrait of the self-conscious artist-hero. O'Connor frequently uses satire as an instrument of moral judgment, but "The Enduring Ch...

Flannery O'Connor's phenomenal power of giving life to her characters is due to a complete mastery of her art which renders with rapid precision their psychological makeup. What Mr. [William] Esty mistakes for the gratuitous grotesque [see excerpt above] is, much of the time, none other than this realism in picturing living, breathing, sweating humanity…. Flannery O'Connor, a Catholic by conviction as well as by birth, writes from a deep Christian concern for the spiritual. Her s...

In the following essay, Sloan challenges popular assessments of O'Connor's The Misfit and instead depicts him as a primitive and dangerous character.

Flannery O'Connor is often billed as a Southern writer, or as a Catholic writer. But, however helpful, these are confining terms. For she was an artist of the most exacting and universal perception…. Almost a dozen books and innumerable articles have been published since 1964 on her small but intense oeuvre…. But far the longest and most important posthumous publication is that of her letters, a collection of more than 600 pages spanning the years 1948–64. For wealth of anecdote ...

[Flannery O'Connor's] major subjects are the struggle for redemption, the search for Jesus, and the meaning of "prophecy": All of these in an intensely evangelical Protestant South, where the need for Christ is expressed without shyness and where "prophecy" is intimately related to the ways in which men are daily challenged to define themselves. The literary problem raised by this peculiarity of "place" (though it may be located elsewhere as well, as a...

Hazel's blinding [in Wise Blood] is neither gratuitous nor contrived, for his act is a consistent resolution of the Oedipal theme in the novel and of the pattern of vision imagery which O'Connor uses to reveal this theme. Because Flannery O'Connor often mocks intellectuals and their feeble constructs, one does not expect to find a psychological situation as potentially hackneyed as the Oedipal complex in her fiction, but the Oedipal situation works throughout Wise Blood to complicate Ha...

I find myself regretting … that [Henry James] never had an opportunity to read Flannery O'Connor's short stories and novels. I think that he would have felt a kinship with her that might have transcended his innate conviction that the writing of novels—a difficult and dangerous task, to begin with—is a task for which men are by nature better fitted than women. If he had lived to read Miss O'Connor's stories, I suspect that he would also have derived from them...

Flannery O'Connor's stories, though varied as to setting and characters, give even the casual reader a single impression. They all seem to say that she does not have a very great regard for her fellowmen…. Going deeper, the reader discovers that, disturbingly, more than contempt for the human race is involved. Running through the stories is one dominating theme: that of innocence versus evil, innocence victimized by evil.

Flannery O'Connor's themes are so traditional as to make her fiction seem unique within the context of the 50s. During a period in which regionalism was becoming suspect, O'Connor rooted her hilariously—often painfully—textured concrete reality in the regionalism of the Georgia sector of the Bible Belt. In a time whose literature still avoided absolutes in its various existential stances, she presents an anti-existential vision of a world offered the mystery of grace, the ...

Vision functions as the dynamic principle in Flannery O'Connor's fiction. From her first novel Wise Blood, through The Violent Bear It Away, and in both collections of short stories, O'Connor portrays characters who are morally blind. Her people project their true selves through the physical qualities of their eyes—through color, shape, and intensity. And their perception of the world is controlled by their limited powers of sight. The reader enters this world through the eyes of...

The great strength of O'Connor's fiction seems to me to spring from the silent and remote rage that erupts from the quiet surface of her stories and that so unexpectedly explodes. It appears, for example, when the Misfit with great politeness has the family exterminated, or when he answers the grandmother's "niceness" with a gunshot and thereby suggests that neither Christian charity nor Southern politeness can contain all the darker human impulses. It appears again in the...

The shock of Flannery O'Connor's death came not in its unexpectedness but in the startling realization that her work is done…. There must be recognition that the two novels, less than twenty short stories, and fewer essays are the work complete of the fiction writer, in my opinion, most significant in our time. But is her work done, indeed? (p. 555)

In the following essay, McDermott analyzes O'Connor's early short story “The Train.”

A perusal of Miss O'Connor's fiction will reveal that Christ-haunted figures furnish the author her principal subject matter. Through the conflicts, often violent ones, of these protagonists who oscillate between belief and unbelief, between self-will and submission, the author presents her view of reality. This grotesque drama that she presents takes place in a discernible theological framework in which there is an implicit acceptance of the concept of a created universe, "with all tha...

Part of the fascination exerted by this thick volume of letters [The Habit of Being] has to do with their evocation of the period which they embrace; much more derives from their revelation of the personality and literary practice of a writer remarkable for the single-mindedness with which she developed and protected a talent that she regarded, quite literally, as God-given. The letters—the first sent from Yaddo to her future agent in 1948, the last a nearly illegible scrawl written six days before h...

In the greatest fiction, the writer's moral sense coincides with his dramatic sense, and I see no way for it to do this unless his moral judgment is part of the very act of seeing, and he is free to use it. I have heard it said that belief in Christian dogma Joe McTyreis a hindrance to the writer, but I myself have found nothing further from the truth. Actually, it frees the storyteller to observe. It is not a set of rules which fixes what he sees in ...

Miss O'Connor's work … has a characteristic which does not occur in the work of any of her contemporaries. Its presence in everything she writes, coupled with her extraordinary talent, makes her, I suspect, one of the most important writers of our age. (p. 3) Miss O'Connor writes lean, stripped, at times almost too flatfooted a prose, and her characters … move always in the harsh glare of every day. But they, too, are warped and misshapen by life—in short, freaks. T...

When Flannery O'Connor's first novel was published in England in 1955, the reviews, she said, were 'respectful but not very perceptive'. Since then she has been somewhat neglected here, though there are signs that she is to be given her due as a writer of great originality and power…. That her modest output shouldn't have found a wide readership in England isn't entirely surprising. There's her bizarre-sounding name, which, as with other similarly unde...

In The Habit of Being, selected letters superbly edited by O'Connor's friend and benefactor Sally Fitzgerald, the reader learns a great deal about the particular genius that enabled O'Connor to connect the visible and the invisible, the material and the spiritual in an original, powerful, and comic way…. O'Connor's characters are backwoods prophets, itinerant farmers, and gossipy, simple people who talk in platitudes. It is the burden of her stories to prove, howeve...

Flannery O'Connor was a brilliant writer. Her fiction was, above all, unexpected and disturbing and she herself was an unexpected, extraordinary person, not much like other people…. I remember that I found [Wise Blood] somehow difficult to like at the beginning. It was so fierce, so hard, so plainly, downrightly unusual. And yet, of course, I did finally like Wise Blood (you can't easily hold out against Hazel Motes) even if I did like better the marvelous short stories, collected in A ...

[The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor] is more than an epistolary autobiography of a great American writer. It is also a "good read," and then some. Like everything O'Connor wrote, no matter how serious, it is very funny. The book intertwines the developing stories of her career, her many friendships, the progress of her omnivorous education, and her ordeal by disseminated lupus erythematosus, which ended her life at the age of 39…. Flannery O'Connor was...

Mrs. May, the central character in Flannery O'Connor's 1956 story, "Greenleaf," is obsessed equally with money and class status. She is disgusted with her "white trash" help, the Greenleafs, but they are a special source of vexation for her in that they have hardworking twin sons who have been successful in life, unlike her own boys. The Greenleaf bull is a complex symbol. The animal combines his social, sexual, and religious identities in a way that allows him to r...

The ending of Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" has received much critical attention. But most critics have failed to realize that spectacles can tell as well as see; that cats can point as well as purr. O'Connor makes good use of such subtle details in the crucial closing lines. Having survived the shock of mass murder, the reader still finds himself face-to-face with the pathological killer, suitably named "The Misfit." Whether his shooting o...

There is the Paul Bowles—Flannery O'Connor cult of the Gratuitous Grotesque…. Flannery O'Connor tells us that she writes out of a "deep Christian concern." The story of hers which, in Allen Tate's view, best exemplifies this concern is the tale of an embittered, virginal Southern bluestocking with a wooden leg who accompanies a young Bible salesman into a barn to seduce him ["Good Country People"]. Her "victim" produces, out of a d...

[The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor offers] no striking literary theories, nor any statements inconsistent with what is already available in O'Connor's book of essays, Mystery and Manners. What [it reveals] is O'Connor's sensibility, shaped and hardened in the isolation of her life on her farm. (p. 34) There has been no little sister in American letters to replace Flannery O'Connor…. [She] has emerged as one of the most gifted writers of recent ...

I am sure [Flannery O'Connor's] few books will live on and on in American literature. They are narrow, possibly, but they are clear, hard, vivid, and full of bits of description, phrases, and odd insights that contain more real poetry than a dozen books of poems. Elizabeth Bishop, "Flannery O'Connor, 1925–1964," in The New York Review of Books (reprinted with permission from The New York Review of Books; copyright © 1964 Nyrev, Inc.), Vol. 111, N...