Describing Flannery O'Connor's fiction as violent, grotesque and horribly funny, with a twist, Margaret Earley Whitt explores the canon of the Georgia writer whose work has long haunted and harassed its readers. In a comprehensive survey that encompasses O'Connor's short stories, novels, essays and letters, as well as the body of criticism that has proliferated since her death in 1964, Whitt illumines the religious themes and bizarre characters that make O'Connor's prose so different from that of other American writers.