Flannery O'Connor

When Flannery O'Connor began writing in the early 1950's, many reviewers assumed that she was little more than a talented female Erskine Caldwell, writing in the ""Southern gothic"" mode. And indeed her work was filled with freaks, one-armed con men, and pathological killers. By the time she died in 1964, serious readers of her fiction knew there was much more involved in her stories. What that ""extra"" was she called the ""added dimension,"" that is, the spiritual depth which she believed...