On Flannery O’Connor’s 'Why Do the Heathen Rage?'

After a silence of nearly 60 years, following her untimely death from lupus, Flannery O’Connor’s hitherto-unpublished prose rises from the page like one of her own fictional epiphanies—electric, immediate, and alive. In a labor of scholarship and love, Jessica Hooten Wilson has reassembled and edited the fragments of O’Connor’s unfinished third novel, offering critical commentary that both frames these episodes and points to the work their author was struggling to envision and execute: a novel whose working title was Why Do the Heathen Rage?