There has been no shortage of critical response to Flannery O’Connor’s all too brief but truly inspired writing life. She has prompted over a dozen critical books, and many dozens of essays or reviews. Some of her readers are taken with her theological sophistication: they want to show how shrewdly she has worked it into her stories and novels. Others, more literary-minded, have found her one of the most compelling masters of fiction this country has produced in recent decades. And then, there are those who connect her resolutely, and often enough with a touch or more of condescension, to...

This book of photographs began almost twenty years ago when I first drove to Milledgeville, Georgia, to interview Flannery O’Connor. On that trip from Tallahassee, Florida, through south and middle Georgia, I watched the landscape change. The Spanish moss gave way to bare trees (for it was late winter); signs nailed to trees advertised their province as Christ or a restaurant 500 yards up the road; pitted, gullied red-clay banks thrust up to the macadam highway; brick chimneys stood as silent markers of vanished houses. I scanned the countryside, as I drove, trying to penetrate beyond the highway images. I...