The Habit of Being by Flannery O’Connor

O’Connor’s letters span sixteen years, 1948 to 1964, from her advent as a young writer to the year of her death from systemic lupus erythematosus at the age of thirty-nine. Her work was so rich, so famous and celebrated, and often so misunderstood, that she, more than some writers, steadily clarified her work and her relationship to it. “The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. . . . Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it.”