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.

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
• Author: Flannery O'Connor
• Edition: reprint, reissue
• Publisher: Macmillan, 2007
• ISBN: 0374530637, 9780374530631
• Length: 236 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Literary; Fiction / Southern