O'Connor was never at home in [the 20th century]. He read Proust, Lawrence and Joyce, but with the admiration that is consistent with suspicion and a determination to go his own way. Modernism interested him as something to keep well way from. He distrusted every technique except the ones he inherited from the 19th-century masters and, according to his own light, practiced. He never doubted that reality was what his eyes and ears told him it was. He did not think that memory and imagination were one and the same, but he has little time for any form of imagination that could not be verified by paying attention to what people did and said.

O'Connor tried his hand at nearly every literary form, but he is most accurately known as a short story writer. He regarded the difference between the novel and the short story as only incidentally a matter of length, scale and capacity. The real difference, he thought, was in implication. The novel refers to a world in which it is possible, however difficult, to live: It implies continuity, latitude of possibility, space to breathe. The short story may offer the same implication, but it rarely does: In common practice, it presents life mainly in the form of constraint and through the feelings of tramps, widows, spoiled priests, monks and only children. O'Connor's affection for the short story speaks of his affection for marginal people, men withering, caught in the duress of circumstance and passion. (p. 3)

Of the several constituents of a short story, O'Connor was most tender toward characterization. Never indifferent to plots and actions, he was more interested in a twist of character than in a turn of events. His stories are always implicit in the characters to whom they happen. Circumstance may be fate, but only if fate is indistinguishable from character: Chances and coincidences are allowed to bring out only what is already in the character. The narrator produces the story, discloses the truth a character could not disclose for himself. The character performs his truth, short of knowing it. Often the narrator is in the center of the story, or close enough to the center to see the value of what happens there. He is not required to be gifted beyond the talent of seeing the relation between a character and what he does or suffers. That is enough. O'Connor never fusses with omniscient narrators: Enough is better than too much. (pp. 3, 28)

O'Connor's strength, in the best of ["Collected Stories"] is his generosity. Knowing what duress means, and the penury of experience available to most people, he has always wanted to do his best for them, to show the quirky doggedness practiced by people who live on the margin. He was not a satirist. Among his contemporaries in Irish fiction, Sean O'Faolain and Liam O'Flaherty are far harder than O'Connor in their accounts of modern Ireland. Among his juniors, Mervyn Wall and James Plunkett have a sense of Ireland far more stringent than O'Connor's. A genial man, O'Connor set his geniality aside only under extreme provocation, and he longed to return to his native mood. He was hard only on people who were soft on themselves.

If he has a weakness—and who has none?—it is a tendency to mistake whimsicality for charm. Like J. M. Synge and other Irish writers, O'Connor wrote an English that remembered the Irish it displaced. Many of his phrases, like Synge's, are translated from the Irish into an English which they render more exotic than their occasion can well sustain….

But it is a minor blemish, all told. At his best, there is no one like O'Connor; at his best, as in "The Bridal Night," "The Long Road to Ummera," "Peasants," "The Majesty of the Law" and another dozen stories just as good as these. I have particular affection for "The Long Road to Ummera," but I admit that Warrenpoint and the wireless have given it even brighter radiance than it deserves. In sober moods I enjoy "The Majesty of the Law" more than any other story of O'Connor's, not only for its humor but, more than that, for its delicacy and tact. (p. 28)