FLANNERY O'CONNOR'S "GOOD COUNTRY PEOPLE"

O'Connor foresaw the deleterious effects of "political correctness" with a gimlet eye: in this shocking story, for example, defttly skewering the notion that sleeping around is empowering for women.

An excerpt from my most recent book: CONSUMED: The Joy, Sorrows and Débacles of a Life Ordered to Art:

Award-winning Catholic novelist and short story writer Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) was an only child whose father died of lupus. As a young woman she studied at the prestigious Iowa Workshop. On the verge of a promising literary career, she contracted lupus herself and returned to the family dairy farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, to live out her remaining days with her mother Regina.

A daily Mass-goer in the overwhelmingly evangelical South, O’Connor referred to herself as a “hillbilly Thomist” and often read a page or two from the Summa Theologica before going to bed. She never married.

Closely observing the family members, neighbors and farmhands with whom she came in contact each day, she wrote stories—about intellectual pride, the perils of secular humanism, and the violence of grace—that even today have the power to shock.

In “Good Country People” Hulga, a would-be nihilist home from college, is seduced by a traveling Bible salesman who steals her wooden leg.