“Mrs. Greenleaf!” She shrilled, “what’s happened?”

Mrs. Greenleaf raised her head. Her face was a patchwork of dirt and tears and her small eyes, the color of two field peas, were red-rimmed and swollen, but her expression was as composed as a bulldog’s. She swayed back and forth on her hands and knees and groaned, “Jesus, Jesus.”

Mrs. May winced. She thought the word, Jesus, should be kept inside the church building like other words inside the bedroom. She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true. “What is the matter with you?” she asked sharply.

“You broken my healing,” Mrs. Greenleaf said, waving her aside. “I can’t talk to you until I finish.”

Mrs. May stood, bent forward, her mouth open and her stick raised off the ground as if she were not sure what she wanted to strike with it.

“Oh Jesus, stab me in the heart!” Mrs. Greenleaf shrieked. “Jesus, stab me in the heart!” and she fell back flat in the dirt, a huge human mound, her legs and arms spread out as if she were trying to wrap them around the earth.

Mrs. May felt as furious and helpless as if she had been insulted by a child. “Jesus,” she said, drawing herself back, “would be ashamed of you. He would tell you to get up from there this instant and go wash your children’s clothes!” and she turned and walked off as fast as she could.[1]

March 25, 2025, marks the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Flannery O’Connor, the great twentieth-century fiction writer. When she died from lupus at the age of thirty-nine on August 3, 1964, her literary genius was widely heralded. In an unprecedented ten-year period, she had been the first-prize winner of the O. Henry Award for best short story for “Greenleaf” (1957), “Everything That Rises Must Converge” (1963), and “Revelation” (1965), and the second-place winner for “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” (1954), and “A Circle in the Fire” (1955). Her 1953 short story that did not win an O. Henry Award, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” is perhaps the most well-known short story in American history. The Complete Stories, a collection of her published and unpublished short stories, won the 1972 National Book Award for fiction, the first time that the award had been given posthumously.

Still, if anything, O’Connor’s fame and influence has only risen in the decades since her death. In 2002, R. Neil Scott’s magisterial 1,061–paged (3 lbs 5 oz ) Flannery O’Connor: An Annotated Reference Guide to Criticism summarized—by my count—seventy-five books, 290 doctoral dissertations, and 1,695 articles, chapters, and essays on O’Connor and her fiction.[2] The appearance of hundreds of post–2002 articles and reviews on O’Connor on JSTOR.org alone, much less numerous new books and a 2023 Ethan Hawke-directed O’Connor biographical motion picture, Wildcat, testifies that interest in O’Connor has not waned.

This is even more fascinating in light of the fact that O’Connor is arguably the first distinguished writer of fiction in American history whose work is Christian in form and substance. In making this claim about O’Connor, Ralph Wood notes that Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, Melville, Poe, Hawthorne, Twain, James, Frost, and Faulkner were heterodox at best, atheist or even nihilist at worst.[3] According to Wood, O’Connor’s imagination was shaped by the scandalous claims of the gospel. That is, she was convinced that God had uniquely and definitely identified himself and his will for the world in Jesus and the church.

O’Connor made clear that this was her intention in writing. She declared,

Let me make no bones about it: I write from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. Nothing is more repulsive to me than the idea of myself setting up a little universe of my own choosing and propounding a little immoralistic message. I write with a solid belief in all the Christian dogmas.[4]

But, contrary to literary expectation with such a stated goal, she did not make her protagonists attractive as she pressed these claims. Her protagonists are the poor, broken in mind and body, rarely happy, and those who possess, at best, a distorted sense of spiritual purpose. They also commit terrible acts—they murder, steal, deceive, and display racist attitudes—that do not give the reader a great assurance of joy in this life.[5] When she informed Sally and Robert Fitzgerald that she was dedicating her volume of short stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, to them, she said, “Nine stories about original sin, with my compliments.”[6]

Robert Drake believes this acknowledgment of the reality of sin is what elevates O’Connor’s stories. “In her own way, she does seem to have man’s number—and the world’s. People are often as she says; and they do often express themselves, in violent words and actions, as she represents them, and not just in darkest Georgia.”[7]

And yet, O’Connor does not look down upon the undeserving lot of murderers and racists, the twisted and neurotic, the guilt-ridden and God-haunted that comprise the heart of her stories. Rather, she makes them serve as the spiritual catalysts of the conflict in each narrative. The Color Purple author, Alice Walker, comments,

It has puzzled some of her readers and annoyed the Catholic church that in her stories not only does good not triumph, it is usually not present. Seldom are there choices, and God never intervenes to help anyone win. To O’Connor, in fact, Jesus was God, and he won only by losing.[8]

But if O’Connor annoyed the Catholic church as Walker posits, Michael Bruner argues that “O’Connor’s God was mainline liberal Christianity’s worst nightmare, a God you could not control, one who was neither respectable nor tame.”[9] That which marks theological liberalism, the goodness of man and the moral uplift of Jesus, is shattered in her stories.

O’Connor stated that her stories concerned “specifically Christ and the Incarnation, the fact that there has been a unique intervention in history. It is not a matter in these stories of Do Unto Others. That can be found in any ethical culture series. It is the fact of the Word made flesh.” O’Connor then provided a specific example of her authorial intent, “As the Misfit said, ‘He thrown everything off balance and it’s nothing for you to do but follow Him or find some meanness.’ This is the fulcrum that lifts my particular stories.”[10]

Although O’Connor believed that salvation is of the Lord, she was acutely aware of the difficulty of revealing the mystery of redemption in Christ in fiction. She maintained that “fiction is the concrete expression of mystery—mystery that is lived,” but “it’s almost impossible to write about supernatural Grace in fiction.”[11] She also believed that she wrote “for an audience who doesn’t know what grace is and don’t recognize it when they see it.”[12]

O’Connor’s methodological solution was part literary and part theological. She took to heart Henry James’s dictum that the morality of a piece of fiction depends on the felt life it contains.[13] O’Conner argued that by showing the concrete—not by saying but showing life as it is—the writer is able to make the action described reveal as much of the mystery of life as possible.[14] In this respect, she praised James’s ability to balance the elements of realism (manners) and romance (mystery).[15]

The theological turn that enabled her to broaden James’s conception of manners and mystery was her adopting an enlarged view of the medieval church practice of the anagogical interpretation of Scripture.[16] According to O’Connor, medieval theologians found three kinds of meaning in the literal level of Scripture, “one they called allegorical, in which one fact pointed to another; one they called tropological, or moral, which had to do with what should be done; and one they called anagogical, which had to do with the Divine life and our participation in it.”[17]

Thus, in composing her stories, O’Connor looked for a single image “that will connect or combine or embody two points; one is a point in the concrete, and the other is a point not visible to the naked eye but believed in by him firmly, just as real to him, really, as the one that everyone sees.”[18] When Hazel Motes in Wise Blood arrives in the city of Taulkinham, the sky functions as a description of the visible things that reflect the divine character of creation, that there is a God that created all things visible and invisible. “The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole order of the universe and would take all time to complete.” However, in Taulkinham, “No one was paying any attention to the sky. The stores in Taulkinham stayed open on Thursday nights so that people could have an extra opportunity to see what was for sale.”[19]

But it is not just the people of Taulkinham who are oblivious to the sky, Hazel is also. After his car is fixed, he tests it by driving it down the road under the sky that “was just a little lighter blue than his suit, clear and even, with only one cloud in it, a large blinding white one with curls and a beard.” The imagery suggests the glory-cloud in the Exodus, but Hazel’s gaze is elsewhere. In his Church Without Christ, “nobody with a good car needs to be justified.” But after the car will not start, a stranger “whose liquid slate-blue eyes duplicate the sky” appears, listens without comment to Hazel’s gospel, helps him restart the Essex with a push, and gives him some gas, only to refuse payment for his help or gas. The car running again, Hazel drives on, but “the blinding white cloud had turned into a bird with long thin wings,”[20] and like the truck the unnamed man was driving, “was disappearing in the opposite direction.”

O’Connor also brought her anagogical vision to bear in an action of grace, in her words, “a gesture that transcended any neat allegory that might have been intended or any pat moral categories a reader could make.”[21] This action of God’s grace in the midst of life lived, and the moment of awareness for those that the grace touches, is what counted for O’Connor in every story. She said, “It seems to me that all good stories are about conversion, about a character’s changing,” and what changes a character is “the action of grace.”[22] The grace manifests itself violently, often subversively, in her characters who are without hope and without God. Among the conversions and indications of potential conversion, narcissistic O. E. Parker (“Parker’s Back”) crashes a tractor into a tree, comes to an end of himself, endures suffering, and is tearfully grateful. Mrs. May (“Greenleaf”), a works-righteousness advocate, is pursued by a tormented lover, a bull, who stabs her in the heart, and she sees the light of another realm. Asbury (“The Enduring Chill), a lazy, ignorant, and conceited young man who believes he is dying, has his eyes opened to the terrifying descent of the Holy Ghost.[23]

In The Violent Bear It Away, Tarwater is faced with the life-defining choice of following the rationalistic, non-believing path of his uncle Rayber or the violent faith-driven path of his great-uncle, Old Tarwater. Tarwater

clenched his fist. He stood like one condemned, waiting at the spot of execution. Then the revelation came, silent, implacable, direct as a bullet. He did not look into the eyes of any fiery beast or see a burning bush. He only knew, with a certainty sunk in despair, that he was expected to baptize the child he saw and begin the life his great-uncle had prepared in him.

This revelation brought Tarwater to see that his only hope was in “trudging into the distance in the bleeding stinking mad shadow of Jesus.” For O’Connor, following after Jesus is a subversive act. Aesthetically, it is a bleeding act; morally, it is a stinking act; and intellectually, it is a mad act.[24]

Readers recoil at how Tarwater can be seen as following Jesus when he subsequently drowns Bishop. O’Connor’s plea to them is that they concentrate on the meaning of actions and not just count the dead bodies in her stories.[25] The murderous Misfit in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” in this sense served as O’Connor’s surrogate when he utters, “She would have been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” O’Connor remarked that the action of grace occurred just earlier when “the Grandmother recognizes the Misfit as one of her own children and reaches out to touch him. It’s the moment of grace for her anyway—a silly old woman—but it leads him to shoot her. This moment of grace excites the devil to frenzy.”[26]

Harold Bloom reacted to O’Connor’s contention concerning The Misfit. Bloom writes, “Secular critic as I am, I need to murmur: ‘Surely that does make goodness a touch too strenuous?’”[27] For Bloom, O’Connor’s greatness is diminished by her commitment to the spiritual. He says, “Her pious admirers to the contrary, O’Connor would have bequeathed us even stronger novels and stories, of the eminence of Faulkner’s, if she had been able to restrain her spiritual tendentiousness.”[28] It is safe to say that O’Connor would not have cared what Bloom thought. She had no interest in hedging on her Christian commitment as an author. In Robert Fitzgerald’s words, O’Connor’s “talent is Pauline in abiding not the lukewarm.”[29]

Her realism, when read today with its unfiltered use of the racist language that she heard living in the South, and at times used herself, is as uncomfortable now to read as it was during the racially sensitive times in which she lived. In 1955 she authored an account of a racist, Mr. Head, and his grandson, Nelson. The story detailed their prejudices and their condescending treatment of blacks in a visit to Atlanta. For the title, “The Artificial Nigger,” she picked the object central to the action of grace in the story, Mr. Head and Nelson coming upon a broken Negro statue, which Mr. Head sees and shouts, “An artificial nigger!” O’Connor commented to Betty Hester that “there is nothing that screams out the tragedy of the South like what my uncle calls “nigger statuary.”[30] O’Connor made clear her intention to Ben Griffith, “What I had in mind to suggest with the artificial nigger was the redemptive quality of the Negro’s suffering for us all.”[31] Rightly or wrongly, O’Connor believed that if she had sanitized the title, the goal of the story, the power of the death of Jesus to turn racist intention into antiracist redemption, would have been lost.[32]

In multiple stories O’Connor lamented those who sought social reform (Shepherd in “The Lame Shall Enter First,” Asbury in “The Enduring Chill”) but ignored the reality and consequences of sin. Original sin, especially its power, infected not just the racially sinful but also the racially righteous (Julian in “Everything That Rises Must Converge”). Thus, she grew impatient with those who believed that integration was the magic cure to all the problems in the South.[33] For O’Connor, sin is ultimately the problem, and the only cure for sin is the cross of Jesus Christ.

A practicing Roman Catholic, O’Connor nevertheless sparsely presented Catholicism in her fiction. This is not to state that her Catholicism did not inform her fiction. She looked to the teachings of Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo as foundational for her art, and she relied upon doctrine as a helpful aid in preserving mystery.[34] But the case can be made, that despite her Thomistic philosophical underpinnings, the essential cast of her fiction when read is more Augustinian than Thomistic. In her stories, she incessantly places limits on one’s ability to reason to God and focuses on faith as the gift of God.[35]

One of O’Connor’s major laments against Protestantism, however, was what she saw around her in the South, its individualism and neglect of the church. In Wise Blood, when Hazel Motes introduces himself to Mrs. Flood as a minister of the Church Without Christ, she asks whether that church was Protestant or Catholic. Hazel replies that it is Protestant. In a letter O’Connor said, “Let me assure you that no one but a Catholic could have written Wise Blood even though it is a book about a kind of Protestant saint. It reduces Protestantism to the twin ultimate absurdities of The Church Without Christ or the Holy Church of Christ Without Christ, which no pious Protestant would do.”[36]

Living in the South and seeking to reflect the churchgoers of that region, O’Connor’s most important religious characters are almost always Protestant. Negatively, she scorned Protestants who substituted sentimentality for recognition of sin, the necessity of Christ’s death to atone, and the coming judgment. Sentimentality, which O’Connor defined as “giving to any creature more love than God gives it,”[37] marks particularly the Christianity of O’Connor’s widows: Mrs. Cope (“A Circle in the Fire”), Mrs. May (“Greenleaf”), the grandmother (“A Good Man Is Hard to Find”), Mrs. Fox (“The Enduring Chill”), Thomas’s mother (“The Comforts of Home”), and Julian’s mother (“Everything that Rises Must Converge”).

O’Connor’s preoccupation with Southern Protestants, however, was not always negative. She declared, “I am more and more impressed with the amount of Catholicism that fundamentalist Protestantism have been able to retain. Theologically our differences with them are on the nature of the Church, not on the nature of God or our obligations to Him.”[38] In “The River,” the fundamentalist preacher Bevel Summers is portrayed as one whose faith and purpose centers wholly on Jesus Christ.

If many hold O’Connor in esteem because of the skill by which she dramatized Christian themes in a realistic manner, others enjoy reading her for her humor. O’Connor knew that her rendering of reality with all its horrors that come from the fall into sin, a very unpopular theme, had to be made bearable, and comedy was one way that she accomplished this.[39] Ralph Wood, the preeminent O’Connor critic of the last half-century, heard O’Connor speak at the college he attended, East Texas State. Those gathered, Wood recalls, laughed raucously at O’Connor’s recalling an old lady who had written to her complaining that O’Connor’s stories had left a bad taste in her mouth. O’Connor replied to the lady that she was not supposed to eat them. But the impact upon Wood was even stronger. He confesses that it was the turning point in his academic and religious life for “I saw in her work the integration of two worlds that I had theretofore thought to be not only separate but opposed, even divorced: uproarious comedy and profound Christianity.”[40]

That O’Connor’s wit and humor appeared in stories that were lined with suffering and hardship reflected the wit and perspective that she maintained in her battle with lupus, an autoimmune disorder in which the body attacks not only tissues, joints, and organs, but also the central nervous system. Despite a daily injection of corticosteroid ACTH, O’Connor constantly contracted high fevers, infections, the inability of her jaw to function, the thinning of her hair, the fattening of her face, and the failure of her joints, hipbone, and skeletal muscles.[41] She confessed to Betty Hester, “I have never been anywhere but sick. In a sense, sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it’s always a place where there’s no company.” She then added, “Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don’t have it miss one of God’s mercies.”[42] The proper measuring of the temporal and the eternal that shined through O’Connor’s life and continues with her fiction led Alice Walker to proclaim of O’Connor, “After her great stories of sin, damnation, prophecy, and revelation, the stories one reads casually in the average magazine seem to be about love and roast beef.”[43]

The lasting appeal of O’Connor’s fiction is the unparalleled way that she wrote about man’s fall and dishonor. Thomas Merton stated that, when thinking of O’Connor as a writer, “I don’t think of Hemingway, or Katherine Anne Porter, or Satre, but rather of someone like Sophocles . . . I write her name with honor, for all the truth and all the craft with which she shows man’s fall and dishonor.”[44] But O’Connor’s value is also in the way that every story is an encounter with Jesus. Robert Drake asserts that Jesus is the principal character “in all of Miss O’Connor’s fiction, whether offstage or, in the words and actions of her characters, very much on. And their encounter with Him is the one story that she keeps telling over and over again.”[45] This theme, and its multiple subthemes, comprises the major burden of O’Connor’s stories. It is seen in the lostness of her characters—Julian “walked along, saturated in depression, as if in the midst of his martyrdom he had lost his faith,” in “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” It is witnessed in her character’s truth-telling about God and this creation—Harper before helping to set the woods afire around Mrs. Cope’s farm declares, “Gawd owns them woods and her too,” in “A Circle in the Fire.” It is observed in her character’s secular mindset and opposition to Jesus—Hazel Motes in Wise Blood defiantly proclaiming that in his Church Without Christ, “I’m going to preach there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from and no Redemption because there was no Fall and no Judgment because there wasn’t the first two. Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar.”[46] It is declared in her character’s pleas to Jesus to save—Mrs. Greenleaf face down in the dirt begging, “Jesus, stab me in the heart!”[47] in “Greenleaf.”

Confrontation with Jesus, the news of another world hid to her characters’s senses but as real as the world they experience here and now, define her stories. O’Connor’s gift was being able to communicate this without abandoning her belief that she was first and foremost a writer. “The novel,” she stated, “is an art form and when you use it for anything other than art, you pervert it.” She then added,

I didn’t make this up. I got it from St. Thomas (via Maritain) who allows that art is wholly concerned with the good of that which is made; it has no utilitarian end. If you do manage to use it successfully for social, religious, or other purposes, it is because you made it art first.[48]

And yet, she also believed that there exists a more vital world than this fallen one and that in writing she sought “to make the reader feel, in his bones if nowhere else, that something is going on here that counts. Distortion in this case is an instrument; exaggeration has a purpose, and the whole structure of the story or novel has been made what it is because of belief.”[49]

Fiction is not Scripture, but reading and re-reading her stories has caused me to awake and to gaze at trees—to stand amazed in the morning light at the splendor of God’s creation, and to confess silently his goodness, wisdom, and power, knowing that I am without excuse before him. It has caused me to ponder whether, in the pilgrimage that is this life, I am like the children reading comic books or the mother sleeping in the car when all around the trees are full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkle. And it has also caused me to be thankful that stalking me in this life is Jesus, the only One that ever raised the dead.

Endnotes

[1] Flannery O’Connor, “Greenleaf,” in Flannery O’Connor, The Complete Stories (Noonday, 1995), 316–317.

[2] R. Neil Scott, Flannery O’Connor: An Annotated Reference Guide to Criticism (Timberlane Books, 2002). Scott also listed author and title information for 521 master’s theses, 537 representative reviews, six motion pictures and videos based on her works, and 24 reviews of the 1979 John Huston-directed film of Wise Blood.

[3] In pointing out O’Connor’s pioneering as an American writer who was Christian in a substantive sense, Wood adds that “T.S. Eliot doesn’t count, since he became Christian after becoming a British citizen.” Ralph C. Wood, Flannery O’Connor and the Church Made Visible (Baylor University Press, 2024), 7.

[4] Flannery O’Connor to Shirley Abbott, March 17, 1956, Habit of Being, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1979), 147. In “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” O’Connor made a similar declaration. She said, “I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in its relation to that.” Flannery O’Connor, “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” in Mystery and Manners, eds. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1969), 32.

[5] William Goyen in the New York Times Book Review (May 18, 1952) described O’Connor’s Wise Blood as a tale of unending vengeance in which the characters were so strange that they did not seem to belong to the human race. Richard Bernard in Commonweal (October 1960) states that the characters in The Violent Bear It Away and the world that they live in occupy the last outposts of unregenerate Protestantism.

[6] Flannery O’Connor to Sally Fitzgerald, Dec. 26, 1954, Habit of Being, 74. Joyce Carol Oates maintains that original sin is O’Connor’s constant theme, and therefore O’Connor “does not—cannot—believe in the random innocence of naturalism, which states that all men are innocent and the victims of inner or outer accidents.” Joyce Carol Oates, New Heaven, New Earth (NY: Vanguard, 1974), 172.

[7] Robert Drake, Flannery O’Connor, A Critical Essay (Eerdmans, 1966), 43.

[8] Alice Walker, “Beyond the Peacock: The Reconstruction of Flannery O’Connor,” in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (Amistad, 1983), 55.

[9] Michael M. Bruner, A Subversive Gospel (IVP, 2017), 76.

[10] Flannery O’Connor to Cecil Dawkins, June 19, 1957, The Habit of Being, 227.

[11] Flannery O’Connor to Eileen Hall, March 10, 1956, Habit of Being, 144.

[12] Flannery O’Connor to “A,” April 4, 1958, Habit of Being, 275.

[13] Flannery O’Connor to “A,” Sept. 15, 1955, Habit of Being, 103.

[14] Robert Fitzgerald, “The Countryside and the True Country,” in Flannery O’Connor, ed. Harold Bloom (Chelsea House, 1986), 20.

[15] O’Connor told Betty Hester that she feared being asked in public what she had read and been influenced by. If asked, she said that she intended “to look dark and mutter, ‘Henry James Henry James’—which would be the verist lie.” Adding that such a statement would be the “verist lie” is perhaps a clever nod to another of O’Connor’s literary influences, Dostoevsky, who said, “We consider the verist lies as truth and demand the same lies from others.” O’Connor further told Hester, “I’ve read almost all of Henry James—from a sense of High Duty and because when I read James I feel something is happening to me, in slow motion but happening nonetheless.” Flannery O’Connor to “A,” Aug. 28, 1955, Habit of Being, 98–99.

[16] In the Greek, ἀναγωγή (anagōgē) conveyed an elevated sense, a revelation of mystery. Horton Davies, “Anagogical Signals in Flannery O’Connor’s Fiction,” Thought, vol. 55, no. 219 (December 1980), 428.

[17] Flannery O’Connor, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” in Mystery and Manners, 72.

[18] Flannery O’Connor, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” Mystery and Manners, 42.

[19] Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood, in Collected Works (The Library of America, 1988), 19.

[20] In Matthew 3:16, Mark 1:10, and Luke 3:22 the dove descending on Jesus is a sign of the Holy Spirit.

[21] Flannery O’Connor, “On Her Own Work,” in Mystery and Manners, 111.

[22] Flannery O’Connor to “A,” Aug. 28, 1955, Habit of Being, 275.

[23] O’Connor also wrote stories in which the protagonist is seemingly condemned, although ambiguity exists. Mr. Shiftlet (“The Life You Save May Be Your Own”) values his freedom so much that he would rather go to the devil than stay with his wife of one day, the innocent and angelic Lucynell. Greedy Mr. Fortune (“A View of the Woods”), after killing his granddaughter in a rage because she identifies herself with her father, finds that the machinery of modern progress is not able to impart life. But Mr. Fortune’s last glance is one where he sees his vanquished mirror-image in the person of his granddaughter.

[24] Bruner, A Subversive Gospel, 9.

[25] O’Connor, Habit of Being, 275. John Desmond, Risen Sons: Flannery O’Connor’s Vision of History (University of Georgia, 1987), 118.

[26] Flannery O’Connor to Andrew Lytle, Feb. 4, 1960, Good Things Out of Nazareth, ed. Benjamin B. Alexander (Convergent, 2019), 95.

[27] Harold Bloom, “Introduction,” in Flannery O’Connor, ed. Harold Bloom (Chelsea House, 1986), 3.

[28] Bloom, “Introduction,” 8. For different perspectives: John Millis maintains that “while no one’s salvation depends on getting Faulkner right, we read Flannery O’Connor knowing that the stakes are ultimate.” See, Ralph C. Wood, Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South (Eerdmans, 2005), 160; Joyce Carol Oates states that O’Connor’s “death in the summer of 1964 marked not simply the end of a career of a powerful descendent of Faulkner whose individual achievements are at times superior to his, but the end of the career of one of the greatest religious writers of modern times.” Oates, New Heaven, New Earth, 145.

[29] Fitzgerald, “Countryside,” 26.

[30] O’Connor to “A,” Sept. 6, 1955, in Habit of Being, 100.

[31] O’Connor to Ben Griffith, May 4, 1955, in Habit of Being, 78. When John Crowe Ransom, editor of the Kenyon Review, mildly inquired about O’Connor changing the title, O’Connor replied if the title would embarrass the magazine that he could of course change it. However, she personally didn’t think it should be called anything but “The Artificial Nigger.” If he did change it, she asked that he call it “The Good Guide.” Flannery O’Connor to John Crowe Ransom, January 12, 1955, Flannery O’Connor Bulletin, vol. 23 (1994–95), 181–82. O’Connor’s suggestion to Ransom mirrors her use of the adjective “Good” in the titles of her stories, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and “Good Country People.” In keeping with the overarching theme of original sin, Mr. Head is not a “good” guide for Nelson despite Mr. Head’s opinion of himself; the Misfit is not a “good” man despite the Grandmother’s declaration; Manley Pointer is not “good” country people despite Mrs. Hopewell and Hulga’s evaluations.

[32] Wood, Christ-Haunted South, 144. Alice Walker lived for a year as a teenager near the O’Connor farm in Milledgeville, Georgia. In “Beyond the Peacock: The Reconstruction of Flannery O’Connor,” Walker argues that “essential” O’Connor is “not about race at all, which is why it is so refreshing, coming, as it does out of a racial culture. If it can be said to be ‘about’ anything, then it is ‘about’ prophets and prophecy, ‘about’ revelation, and ‘about’ the impact of supernatural grace on human beings who don’t have a chance of spiritual growth without it” (53). After Loyola of Maryland University removed O’Connor’s name from one of its dormitories in 2020, Walker was the first name appearing on the July 31, 2020, “Letter in Protest of the Cancelling of Flannery O’Connor,” which was signed by over one hundred English scholars and religious leaders. Walker said, “We must honor Flannery for growing. Hide nothing of what she was, and use that to teach.” The “Letter in Protest” acknowledges that “O’Connor may—and does—make some racially insensitive statements in her private correspondence. There is no excusing this. But in her stories her better angels rules. She holds herself—all of her racist white characters—and all white people—up for judgment.”

[33] Wood, Christ-Haunted South, 110.

[34] O’Connor stated, “I have heard it said that belief in Christian dogma is a hindrance to the writer, but I myself have found nothing further from the truth. Actually, it forces the storyteller to observe. It is not a set of rules which fixes what he sees in the world. It affects his writing primarily by guaranteeing his respect for mystery.” O’Connor, “Fiction Writer,” 31.

[35] Attesting that the Augustinian emphasis of O’Connor trumps her Thomistic emphasis, Frederick Asals writes, “Reconciliation and synthesis, the congruity of faith and human reason, the harmonious hierarchy of the faculties—the great accommodations of Thomistic thought seem curiously irrelevant to the central experience of O’Connor’s fiction; whereas Augustine’s disposition of the major contraries—grace and sin, spirit and flesh, God and self, the heavenly city and the earthly—immediately evokes the tensions and dualities of her work. Frederick Asals, Flannery O’Connor, The Imagination of Extremity (University of Georgia, 1982), 200. Also see Mark Greif, The Age of the Crisis of Man (University Press, 2015), 208.

[36] Flannery O’Connor to Ben Griffith, Mar. 3, 1954, Habit of Being, 69. O’Connor added concerning Wise Blood, “And of course no unbeliever or agnostic could have written it because it is entirely Redemption-centered in thought.”

[37] Kathleen Feeley, Flannery O’Connor: Voice of the Peacock (University of Rutgers, 1972), 33. Feeley adds that O’Connor despised sentimentality because O’Connor believed it was “an attempted short cut to the grace of Redemption which overlooks its price” (33).

[38] Carter Martin judged from an overall assessment of O’Connor’s work that she “writes from an orthodox Christian point of view but grinds no theological ax, unless the basic Christian truth of man’s fall from grace and his redemption through Christ’s sacrifice be so construed.” Carter Martin, The True Country (Vanderbilt, 1969), 21.

[39] Frederick Asals comments that any thesis about the religious dimensions of O’Connor’s fiction cannot contain adequately “the incorrigible sense of comedy that animates and burnishes her creations everywhere . . . . It overflows the borders, leaps beyond the ironic tones and satiric perceptions that may be ascribed to the prophetic stance, beyond even the caricaturing that accompanies the pressures of the ascetic action, to maintain a life of its own.” Asals, Imagination of Extremity, 233.

[40] Wood, Christ-Haunted South, ix.

[41] Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, Radical Ambivalence (Fordham University Press, 2020), 99–100.

[42] O’Connor to “A,” June 28, 1956, in Habit of Being, 163.

[43] Walker, “Beyond the Peacock,” 57.

[44] O’Connor, Complete Stories, back jacket cover.

[45] Drake, Flannery O’Connor, A Critical Essay, 17.

[46] O’Connor, Wise Blood, in Collected Works, 59.

[47] O’Connor, “Greenleaf,” in Collected Works, 506.

[48] Flannery O’Connor to Father J. H. McCown, May 9, 1956, in Habit of Being, 157. On O’Connor’s methodology and its implications, Ralph Wood elaborates, “She abominated the notion of the novelist as evangelist. Evangelism is what preachers should do, but what true artists do not. She totally embraced St. Thomas’s claim that art is a virtue of practical, not the moral intellect. The artist does not seek to improve the reader’s life, though this may be the salutary effect of her art. First and last, the artist seeks ‘the good of the thing made.’ Never does she set out to render an idea (not even the highest and the holiest) into fictional form. She wants, instead, to master her craft—plot, character, point of view, scene, atmosphere, etc. ‘Sink the theme’ was the motto she learned at the University of Iowa Creative Writing Workship. In so far as a work has a ‘thesis’ at all, it must emerge silently, even if powerfully, from the work itself—never because the writer has imposed it by literary force. Thus she was willing to risk the mangling of her work by her readers. So be it.” Email correspondence, Ralph C. Wood to Danny Olinger, August 19, 2024.

[49] Flannery O’Connor, “Novelist and Believer,” Mystery and Manners, 162.

Danny E. Olinger is a minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and serves as the general secretary of the Committee on Christian Education of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Ordained Servant Online, January, 2025.