Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor

Product Details

Synopsis

Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor’s astonishing and haunting first novel, is a classic of twentieth-century literature. Focused on the story of Hazel Motes, a twenty-two-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his innate, desperate fate, this tale of redemption, retribution, false prophets, blindness, blindings, and wisdoms gives us one of the most riveting characters in twentieth-century American fiction.

Annotation

Wise Blood is the story of Hazel Motes of Eastrod, Tennessee. He returns from World War II and back at home falls under the spell of street preacher Asa Hawks and his daughter, Lily Sabbath Hawks.

Motes sets about preaching his own 'word': a new religion called The Church Without Christ. Of course he runs into conflict with Hawks. The beauty and power of the book come out of O'Connor's brutal depiction of the characters you love to hate who turn up unexpectedly.

William Goyen

There is in Flannery O'Connor a fierceness of literary gesture, an angriness of observation, a facility for catching, as an animal eye in a wilderness, cunningly and at one sharp glance, the shape and detail and animal intention of enemy and foe. -- Books of the Century, The New York Times review May, 1952

Biography

Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925. When she died at the age of thirty-nine, America lost one of its most gifted writers at the height of her powers.