Carlene Bauer writes about Flannery O’Connor’s letters in her review of Flannery (above). One of the moments in the collection that most potently combines O’Connor’s humor and crustiness comes in a letter to her longtime correspondent Betty Hester. In it, the author bristles at a review of her story collection A Good Man is Hard to Find:

The notice in the New Yorker was not only moronic, it was unsigned. It was a case in which it is easy to see that the moral sense has been bred out of certain sections of the population, like the wings have been bred off certain chickens to produce more white meat on them. This is a generation of wingless chickens, which I suppose is what Nietzsche meant when he said God was dead.

I am mighty tired of reading reviews that call A Good Man brutal and sarcastic. The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism. I believe that there are many rough beasts now slouching toward Bethlehem to be born and that I have reported the progress of a few of them, and when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.

Another two sentences, also to Hester, that I wanted to share:

You have to be able to dominate the existence that you characterize. That is why I write about people who are more or less primitive.