Walter Tilman News Today

The author of some of Southern Gothic’s greatest prose, Flannery O’Connor, was working on a third novel when death took her at age 39. A new book attempts to piece together what she left behind and thus give us a glimpse at what might have been.

In 2009, Jessica Hooten Wilson was freshly finished with her doctoral dissertation, which included the Southern Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor. Over dinner at an academic conference in Rome, a revered O'Connor scholar mentioned to her the writer's unfinished novel. Wilson was intrigued, and later that year she traveled to see it herself at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville, Georgia, which holds O'Connor's papers in its archives.