11. Sally Fitzgerald, ed., The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 490.
12. First published in 1965, Katallagete served in part as a forum for Southern Christians associated with a variety of political causes. Contributors ranged from Will Campbell, the director of the Committee of Southern Churchmen (CSC) and the journal’s publisher, to Leslie Dunbar, at one time head of the reformist Southern Regional Council, and the celebrated essayist, James McBride Dabbs.
13. An essay Merton was writing; see Tolson, Pilgrim in the Ruins, 342; also reprinted in Social and Political Essays by Thomas Merton.
14. Percy cites Young whose words were quoted in Merton’s essay “The Long Hot Summer of 67.” See Patrick Samway, Walker Percy, 263–64.
15. Caroline Gordon, The Glory of Hera (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972).
16. “Andalusia Foundation gifts Flannery O’Connor’s home to the GCSU Foundation, Georgia College, accessed June 27, 2018, https://frontpage.gcsu.edu/announcement/andalusia-foundation-gifts-flannery-o’connor’s-home-gcsu-foundation.
17. O’Connor, Habit of Being, 347.
18. Nouwen, Love, Henri, 235.
Flannery O’Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925. She lived most of her life on a farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she raised peacocks and wrote. She was the author of two novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away; thirty-one short stories; and numerous essays and reviews. She died at the age of thirty-nine. Her complete short stories, published posthumously in 1971, received the National Book Award for fiction.
Benjamin B. Alexander, PhD, a dynamic classroom teacher with over forty years of experience, has lectured widely on American, medieval, and African-American literature, as well as political theory and public policy. Dr. Alexander currently is crafting a critical study of Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright August Wilson and Shakespeare, as well as reviewing the unpublished essays of Walker Percy and Ralph Ellison for possible publication. Visit him at BenjaminBAlexander.com.
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