Flannery O'Connor was known to have been influenced by Nikolai Gogol and Nathaniel Hawthorne. She was also familiar with Allen and Caroline Tate's works, and with T. S. Eliot and Robert Perm Warren. While O'Connor's writing is not as verbose as William Faulkner's, her use of shocking events to evoke a point in her story similar to that used by Faulkner in "A Rose for Emily".