O'Connor was never at home in [the 20th century]. He read Proust, Lawrence and Joyce, but with the admiration that is consistent with suspicion and a determination to go his own way. Modernism interested him as something to keep well way from. He distrusted every technique except the ones he inherited from the 19th-century masters and, according to his own light, practiced. He never doubted that reality was what his eyes and ears told him it was. He did not think that memory and imagination were one and the same, but he has little time for any form of imagination that could not be verified by paying attention to what people did and said.

O'Connor tried his hand at nearly every literary form, but he is most accurately known as a short story writer. He regarded the difference between the novel and the short story as only incidentally...