Wise Blood: A Novel

Flannery O'Connor

Macmillan, Mar 6, 2007 - Fiction - 236 pages

Flannery O'Connor's haunting first novel of faith, false prophets, and redemptive wisdom
Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor's astonishing and haunting first novel, is a classic of twentieth-century literature. It is the story of Hazel Motes, a twenty-two-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his inborn, desperate fate. He falls under the spell of a "blind" street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate fifteen-year-old daughter, Sabbath Lily. In an ironic, malicious gesture of his own non-faith, and to prove himself a greater cynic than Hawks, Motes founds the Church Without Christ, but is still thwarted in his efforts to lose God. He meets Enoch Emery, a young man with "wise blood," who leads him to a mummified holy child and whose crazy maneuvers are a manifestation of Motes's existential struggles. This tale of redemption, retribution, false prophets, blindness, blindings, and wisdom gives us one of the most riveting characters in American fiction.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - wishanem - LibraryThing

"Wise Blood" is probably hilarious for some people. It reminded me a lot of "There will be Blood" in that other people loved it and I found it dull and frustrating.

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - francoisvigneault - LibraryThing

As raw, cruel, nasty, fascinating, and darkly comic as anything I can recall reading. A short but deep portrait of lost individuals and a corrupt society.

Contents

• Section 1: 3
• Section 2: 25
• Section 3: 33
• Section 4: 63
• Section 5: 75
• Section 6: 99
• Section 7: 115
• Section 8: 129
• Section 9: 145
• Section 10: 165
• Section 11: 173
• Section 12: 193
• Section 13: 203
• Section 14: 217

About the author

Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) was one of America's most gifted writers. She wrote two novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, and two story collections, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge. Her Complete Stories, published posthumously in 1972, won the National Book Award that year, and in a 2009 online poll it was voted as the best book to have won the award in the contest's 60-year history. Her essays were published in Mystery and Manners and her letters in The Habit of Being.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Wise Blood: A Novel; FSG Classics; Flannery O'Connor Collection; Issue 318 of Noonday Press paperbacks
• Author: Flannery O'Connor
• Edition: reprint, reissue
• Publisher: Macmillan, 2007
• ISBN: 0374530637, 9780374530631
• Length: 236 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Literary; Fiction / Southern; Fiction / World Literature / American / 20th Century