Miss O'Connor's work … has a characteristic which does not occur in the work of any of her contemporaries. Its presence in everything she writes, coupled with her extraordinary talent, makes her, I suspect, one of the most important writers of our age. (p. 3)

Miss O'Connor writes lean, stripped, at times almost too flatfooted a prose, and her characters … move always in the harsh glare of every day. But they, too, are warped and misshapen by life—in short, freaks. The difference between her work and that of her gifted contemporaries lies in the nature and the causes of their freakishness. (p. 5)

The affair between Haze Motes and Sabbath Lily Hawks [in Wise Blood] proceeds to a logical and … terrifying conclusion…. She will go to almost any lengths to get her man and to even greater length to fulfil another womanly function, maternity. Haze yields to her blandishments partly as a way of proving his faith in the Church of Christ Without Christ. They set up housekeeping in a rented room. Haze's friend—or enemy—Enoch Emery, obeying a compulsive impulse, or, as he would put it, his "wise blood," steals a mummy from a city museum. He hears Haze preaching his gospel: "The Church Without Christ don't have a Jesus but it needs one! It needs a new jesus"—and he rushes home, wraps the mummy up and deposits it at Haze's door. Haze is lying on the bed, a bandage over his eyes. Sabbath receives the bundle, unwraps it and after a few moments, during which her face has "an empty look, as if she didn't know what she thought about him or didn't think anything," cradles him in her arms and begins to croon to him. The unholy family is now complete.

Miss O'Connor does not stop there but piles horror on horror. (pp. 5-6)

Miss O'Connor's talent, occurring in such a milieu, is as startling, as disconcerting as a blast from a furnace which one had thought stone-cold but which is still red-hot.

Haze Motes, Miss O'Connor's hero, is illiterate and of lowly origins, but he is spiritually kin to more highly placed Americans. His whole life is given over to a speculation on the nature of Christ, the union of the divine with the human…. Haze, a man of action and, it seems to me, a tragic hero, dies in a ditch, self-blinded as the penalty of his disbelief. (pp. 6-7)

In Miss O'Connor's vision of modern man—a vision not limited to Southern rural humanity—all her characters are "displaced persons," not merely the people in the story of that name. They are "off center," out of place, because they are victims of a rejection of the Scheme of Redemption. They are lost in that abyss which opens for man when he sets up as God. This theological framework is never explicit in Miss O'Connor's fiction. It is so much a part of her direct gaze at human conduct that she seems herself to be scarcely aware of it. I believe that this accounts to a great extent for her power. It is a Blakean vision, not through symbol as such but through the actuality of human behavior; and it has [William] Blake's explosive honesty…. (pp. 9-10)