Wise Blood

Later, she received an MFA, Master's of Fine Arts, from the university.

Her first novel, Wise Blood, was published in 1952.

So she wrote novels and short stories, but was best known for her short story collections.

After graduating from the University of Iowa in 1947, O'Connor pursued her writing, spending time at Yaddo, an artist retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York.

Murphy's comment: Flannery O'Connor was only 14 years older than me, so I am aware of the metamorphosis of O'Connor's and my more traditional and religious culture and that of today's decadent culture.

Today, such a faith-orientated writer would have no chance to be a best-selling author or to be famous.

O'Connor's work includes her novels Wise Blood, The Violent Bear, and Why Do the Heathen Rage? Her short story collections include A Good Man Is Hard to Find, Good Country People, Everything That Rises Must Converge, and the Complete Stories.

Her nonfiction and letters include The Habit of Being, Mystery and Manners, which are essays and lectures on the Catholic faith and on writing.

It forces the reader to confront the fact that America's history provides horrors far more terrifying than anything Horace Walpole could have invented.

And we see another form of intense, internalized American reckoning in Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood.

O'Connor is a master of the Southern Gothic, but her focus isn't necessarily on historical ghosts.

It's on intense spiritual and religious wrestling.

Wise Blood was her debut novel, and it introduces us to one of the most fascinating characters in American literature, Hazel Motes.

O'Connor famously described Hazel Motes as the kind of saint the modern American South would produce.

Which is such a wild description, because Hazel Motes is fiercely anti-religious He is a returning World War II veteran who is an atheist, but he becomes so rigidly, obsessively religious in his anti-religious convictions that he essentially starts his own street preaching ministry, The Church Without Christ.

And with A24 developing a wildly revisionist cinematic adaptation of it right now, its themes of elite isolation versus mass suffering are clearly still striking a very raw nerve.

Perhaps there was something to Eastern medicine and a meticulous skincare routine.

Clara began to pack her shoulder bag, which was heavier than normal today.' What's that book you got there, dear? Wise Blood? Flannery O'Connor? I don't know.

I don't get it.

I think it's about religion.

I will say much more about Miss O'Connor.

We'll say more about Wise Blood in particular, her first of two, but first novel.

I should preface all of this.

My children have started listening to classical stuff you should know.

So she goes off to be a part of this writer's workshop.

She starts to she writes short stories.

She also writes a short story which will eventually become the opening scene of Wise Blood.

And so this idea is starting early on for her.

It's funny you bring that up because I don't ever do this, but I agreed with some guys from my church to be part of a reform or, I don't know, participate in a sort of impromptu book club.

So we all read Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood.

And just two nights ago, yeah, today's Wednesday.

So on Monday night, we got together and discussed it for like three hours with some bourbon.

Yeah, yeah.

So all these conversations, I mean, Flannery O'Connor, I devoured her short stories when I was in college and after college, and I had not read either of her two novels.

And so reading Wise Blood was my first foray into her longer fiction.

And I mean...