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 Good Man is Hard to Find. But where had all this come from? one was always asking oneself. The author had led a secluded life…. Her work was utterly different; it was Southern, rural, wicked, with a nearly inexplicable knowledge of the deformed and sinful, the all-too-deeply experienced…. She saw everything with a severe humor, local enough in accent, but more detached, more difficult to define than most other Southern writing. You'd have to call "A Good Man is Hard to Find" a "funny" story even though six people are killed in it.

"Good Country People" is an astonishing work which Allen Tate has called "the most powerful story of maimed souls by a contemporary writer." The story starts off with an over-blown, exaggerated cast…. [The] characters are, in outline, fit only for a dirty joke, and the plot continues accordingly…. But the story is a superb success. It is wise and memorable and entirely believable. (p. 21)

No doubt every sort of religious or moral stress might be put upon this story; indeed it seems to demand it. In everything of Flannery O'Connor's we are aware of her intense preoccupation with the ragged remnants of Protestantism, those hungry sectarians, those wandering souls with the Answer, those diviners of Revelations, and receivers of code messages from the Holy Spirit. Nearly every plot development turns in this direction. (pp. 21, 23)

Her second novel, The Violent Bear it Away, is about Baptism, the duty to which these mad St. Johns of the Southern wilderness are called. This novel ends in an unbearable immolation scene and is one of the strangest productions in recent American fiction. It is grotesque, painful, again "funny," and entirely original in spirit and theme. Flannery O'Connor's backwoodsmen need God and Faith, and especially revelation; but every mad one of them is on his own….

Flannery O'Connor's brilliant talent was of that sort that has a contradiction in every pore. She was, indeed, a Catholic writer, also a Southern writer; but neither of these traditions prepares us for the oddity and beauty of her lonely fiction. (p. 23)