Wise Blood (1952) is O’Connor’s first novel. It tells the story of young Hazel Motes who, like Francis Tarwater, is caught in a struggle against his innate faith.

O’Connor’s most celebrated collection of short stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (1955), is a classic of Southern Gothic literature that tells of the underside of life in the rural South.

The posthumously-published The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor (1988) offers a self-portrait of an author who otherwise revealed very little of herself.

The subjects of O’Connor’s essays in her prose collection Mystery and Manners (1969) include writing, religion, teaching literature, and the grotesque in Southern fiction.

In Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith (2003), Jon Krakauer recounts the chilling story of Dan and Ron Lafferty, Mormon brothers who in 1984 murdered their sister-inlaw and infant niece in the name of a divine revelation, and it explores one type of modern-day religious fundamentalism in the United States.

In Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s (2000), Peter Daniel chronicles the changes that transformed the South in the period following World War II and describes the culture that developed from poverty, religious fundamentalism, and racial obsessions.

A Curtain of Green and Other Stories (1941) is the first collection of stories by Eudora Welty, another Southern woman whose work contains elements of horror and humor.

Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (2003), by Mark Juergensmeyer, explores the mindset of those who perpetrate and support violence in the name of religion.