The Miss Firecracker Contest (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1985). Henley's most successful play next to Crimes of the Heart. Also set in a small Mississippi town (Brookhaven), it follows the trials and tribulations of Carnelle Scott, a twenty-four-year-old woman with a bad reputation in town who seeks to redeem herself by winning the title of Miss Firecracker for the Fourth of July celebration. With a cast full of very odd characters who, like Carnelle, seek some kind of redemption from their lives, the play probes the grotesque even more so than Crimes of the Heart. While some critics have suggested that Henley merely reworks the same ideas from play to play, others have found The Miss Firecracker Contest a fresh, original expression of Henley's unique view of life in small southern towns. The play was adapted into a film in 1989, starring Holly Hunter.

Marsha Norman: 'night, Mother. Henley and Marsha Norman are often compared and/or contrasted to one another because they each won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama in the early 1980s. Reading this play helps highlight the similarities and differences between the two playwrights.

Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works (New York: Library of America, 1988) and The Complete Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971). Reading some of the work of this legendary writer of the ' 'Southern Gothic'' tradition, you can judge for yourself the validity of the connections numerous critics have drawn between her work and Henley's plays.

Carol S. Manning, editor, The Female Tradition in Southern Literature (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993). A collection of essays both on specific writers, and on topics such as "Southern Ladies and the Southern Literary Renaissance'' and ' 'Spiritual Daughters of the Black American South." Containing extensive analysis of Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor, two writers of "Southern Gothic" fiction to whom Henley is often compared, the volume is also is quite useful in placing Henley within a historical continuum of southern women writers, and examining common threads of experience with other writers from whom she differs in other ways.

John B. Boles, editor, Dixie Dateline: a Journalistic Portrait of the Contemporary South (Houston: Rice University Press, 1983). A collection of eleven essays by eminent journalists, presenting a variety of perspectives on the South, its culture, its history, and its future.