New essay in PEN America

An essay I wrote about Flannery O'Connor is in the new issue of PEN America.

The first line:

There’s a great moment in her 1964 story “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” where Flannery O’Connor writes of a snobby wannabe writer’s complicated feelings toward his ancestral Southern home: “He never spoke of it without contempt or thought of it without longing.”