Flannery O'Connor was an extraordinary person, an extraordinary thinker and writer—and she knew it. Once a student in Texas asked her why she wrote. She later told John Hawkes her reply: ""because I'm good at it," says I." She had meant to display disgust at shallowness and impertinence, but it also shows her quick and ready wit—and her abiding attitude. "Every serious novelist," she wrote, "is trying to portray reality as it manifests itself in our concrete, sensual life, and he can't do this unless he has been given the initial instrument, the talent, and unless he respects the talent, as such." For herself, she had no doubts.

She had her reasons, of course, and, as a Catholic, a firm sense of duty and responsibility that imposed additional demands. "The poet is traditionally a blind man," she remarked, thinking of such bards as Homer and the singer of Beowulf, "but the Christian poet, and storyteller as well, is like the blind man whom Christ touched, who looked then and saw men as if they were trees, but walking. This is the beginning of vision, and it is an invitation to deeper and stranger visions that we shall have to learn to accept if we want to realize a truly Christian literature." So she gave us Mr. Fortune's vision in turn in "A View of the Woods" ("On both sides of him he saw that the gaunt trees had thickened into mysterious dark files that were marching across the water and away into the distance") and the vision of Mrs. Turpin in, appropriately enough, a late story called "Revelation" ("She saw the streak [of light] as a vast swinging bridge extending