All Beak And Claws

摘要

"This is one of the greatest stories ever written in the United States," suggested Robert Giroux, a distinguished American publisher, after reading the manuscript of "A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor. "That's good stuff," echoed her fellow-southerner, William Faulkner, about O'Connor's first novel, "Wise Blood". Others found her acidly comic tales strong meat. Asked to provide a puff for "Wise Blood", Evelyn Waugh, a British novelist, was moved to ponder: "Why are so many characters in recent American fiction sub-human?" Time magazine, in summarising her cast of drowning boys, garrulous southern grandmothers and man-killer prophets, called them "God-intoxicated Hillbillies".