SOURCE: Als, Hilton. “This Lonesome Place.” New Yorker (29 January 2001): 82-8.

In the following essay, Als considers the defining characteristics of O'Connor's fiction.

The two niggers, a man and a woman, cutting across the field are looking for a little moonshine when they spot the white boy, Francis Marion Tarwater—the teen-age antihero of Flannery O'Connor's startling second novel, The Violent Bear It Away—who is digging a grave for his great-uncle Mason. Mason, a self-titled prophet who spent his life denouncing the world for having forsaken its Saviour, believed that Tarwater might have the calling, too, but the boy is not feeling his religion right now, standing in the dirt, just this side of death. O'Connor writes:

The woman, tall and Indianlike, had on a green sun hat. She stooped under the fence without pausing and came on across the yard toward the grave; the man held the...