Flannery O'Connor

This volume draws on the author's six-year correspondence with Flannery O'Connor in this evaluation of the Southern writer as an intellectual and as a student of the Western tradition in literature and religion. He emphasizes her deep connection with writers such as Joyce and Bernanos in the context of the Modernist tradition, and discusses how her study of these religious writers influenced her visions of world apocalypse and religious community. The author studies the revealed tensions and interrelationships of O'Connor's "secular intellect" versus her "religious intellect."