Flannery O'Connor: American Literary Hidden Treasure

Flannery O’Connor was an American short story writer of the mid-20th Century who possessed exceptional talent and received high critical acclaim, yet her work today seems obscure if not apocryphal. “Dismissed as a minor writer by some critics, totally rejected by others…” (Lukas 5197) or as eloquently described in 1997 by Joseph Zornado

…[R]ecent scholarship locates O’Connor’s literary achievement on a kind of literary desert island. Seemingly off the main trade routes, her work betrays a terrifying, unruly domain that critical missionaries attempt to civilize with a more accessible kind of Christianity, while the greatest explorers consider the island too wild or already tamed (28).