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, however, that their folksiness is often wise beyond words. In a typical O'Connor story, the logical positivist or existentialist and the Christ-haunted misfit confront one another in a life-and-death struggle, where logic and sophistication are no match for fundamentalist, even primitive, truth….

Anyone who admires O'Connor's fiction,… would expect almost anything she wrote to be extraordinary; but I was unprepared for the splendor of these letters, the wit, the brilliance, the precision of statement, the deep...