Flannery O'Connor's phenomenal power of giving life to her characters is due to a complete mastery of her art which renders with rapid precision their psychological makeup. What Mr. [William] Esty mistakes for the gratuitous grotesque [see excerpt above] is, much of the time, none other than this realism in picturing living, breathing, sweating humanity…. Flannery O'Connor, a Catholic by conviction as well as by birth, writes from a deep Christian concern for the spiritual. Her stories, the characters that live in them, the excellencies of her style, are not ends in themselves but rigorously subordinated means of showing us reality, the quality of goodness and the subtle malice of sin, either of which have power to determine our destiny.

One of the first things which strike us in these stories [in A Good Man Is Hard to Find] is the peculiar rigor with which the author limits...