The first necessity confronting him [författaren] will be to say what he is not doing; for even if there are no genuine schools in American letters today, there is always some critic who has just invented one and who is ready to put you into it. If you are a Southern writer, that label, and all the misconceptions that go with it, is pasted on you at once, and you are left to get it off as best you can. I have found that no matter for what purpose peculiar to your special dramatic needs you use the Southern scene, you are still thought by the general reader to be writing about the South and are judged by the fidelity your fiction has to typical Southern life.

I am always having it pointed out to me that life in Georgia is not at all the way I picture it, that escaped criminals do not roam the roads exterminating families, nor Bible salesmen prowl about looking for girls with wooden legs.

Ur ”Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction”, 1960.

Just nu läser jag O’Connors roman Blodsbunden (Wise Blood) och är glad att jag äntligen har plockat bort O’Connor ur gruppen av författare som jag tänker att jag borde läsa och att hon nu hör till dem jag har läst. Jag ska berätta mer om Blodsbunden någon annan dag, men sista stycket i citatet ovan ger en liten hint om den värld hon skriver om: skruvad, mörkt humoristisk och med religionen ständigt närvarande.