Authors Like Flannery O'Connor

Muriel Spark

Scottish · The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), Memento Mori (1959)

Spark wrote very short, very funny novels in which the moral stakes are absolute and nobody is spared. Her signature device is the flash-forward used as a weapon: she tells you in chapter two exactly how a character will die, then makes you watch them walk toward it. Memento Mori is a comedy about elderly people receiving anonymous calls saying that they must die. She converted to Catholicism in 1954 and said the conversion was what let her see human existence whole enough to write novels at all.

Carson McCullers

American · The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951)

McCullers wrote the interior life of people nobody in their town can talk to: a deaf-mute, a twelve-year-old girl with no place at a wedding, a giantess who runs a café. Her small Southern towns are rendered with an almost anthropological flatness, and her real subject is the asymmetry of love — the lover and the beloved are never the same person, and the beloved usually resents it. Her life was hard: rheumatic fever, strokes from her twenties, severe alcoholism, and a husband who killed himself in 1953 after she refused to die with him.

Cormac McCarthy

American · Child of God (1973), Blood Meridian (1985), The Road (2006)

McCarthy wrote violence as a metaphysical condition rather than a plot event, in stripped biblical prose with almost no punctuation and no interiority: you are told what people do and say, never what they feel. His early Appalachian novels — Outer Dark, Child of God, Suttree — are the most directly O'Connor-shaped work in American fiction. He praised her for being able to dramatise love and grace strikingly in their absence, a remark that reaches us through scholarship rather than an interview transcript. In November 2024, eighteen months after his death, Vanity Fair published Vincenzo Barney's account of his decades-long relationship with Augusta Britt, who was sixteen when they met in 1976 and he was forty-two; the piece reported that he forged her birth certificate in 1977 and took her to Mexico. Britt has said publicly that she does not regard the relationship as abusive. The article's celebratory framing drew heavy criticism and parts of the reporting have been questioned.

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Denis Johnson

American · Jesus' Son (1992), Tree of Smoke (2007)

Jesus' Son is eleven linked stories narrated by an addict whose grip on chronology and causation is unreliable, and in whose wrecked perception ordinary moments keep going luminous. Johnson's sentences turn without warning — a hospital shift, a car crash, a man with a knife through his eye — and the turn is usually toward something like awe. He got sober in the early eighties and wrote about the years before it from the far side. Tree of Smoke won the National Book Award in 2007.

George Saunders

American · Tenth of December (2013), Lincoln in the Bardo (2017)

Saunders writes comic dystopias — theme parks, corporate incentive schemes, pharmaceutical trials — narrated in the debased idiom of the people trapped inside them, and then breaks your heart with an act of unglamorous self-sacrifice in the last two pages. Lincoln in the Bardo won the Booker in 2017. He teaches in the Syracuse MFA and writes about craft publicly, which makes him unusually articulate about how a story actually works.

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Authors like George Saunders →

Jesmyn Ward

American · Salvage the Bones (2011), Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017)

Ward writes poor Black Mississippi from the inside: a family boarding up before Hurricane Katrina, a boy driving to Parchman prison to collect his father, an enslaved girl walking south to Louisiana. She works myth into the realism openly, and the ghosts are not metaphors — they talk. She is the only woman to have won the National Book Award for Fiction twice, and a MacArthur Fellow since 2017.

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Eudora Welty

American · A Curtain of Green (1941), The Optimist's Daughter (1972)

Welty is the great listener of American fiction. Her stories run on overheard talk, and she can build a family's entire history out of what people say at a funeral. She was also a serious documentary photographer in Depression-era Mississippi, and the fiction has the same quality of attention: patient, exact, unhurried. The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer in 1973. Criticised for political reticence during the civil rights era, she answered in part with “Where Is the Voice Coming From?”, narrated from inside the head of Medgar Evers's murderer and published by The New Yorker within weeks of the 1963 assassination.

Graham Greene

British · The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948)

Greene wrote thrillers that are also theological arguments. The Power and the Glory follows an alcoholic, cowardly, fornicating priest fleeing a Mexico that has outlawed the Church, and refuses to let him be either a fraud or a saint. His characters damn themselves knowingly and are not obviously beyond mercy. He converted to Catholicism in 1926 and later called himself a Catholic agnostic. He was an MI6 officer from 1941 to 1944 under Kim Philby, and wrote an introduction to Philby's memoir in 1968 without ever disavowing the friendship. In 1937 Twentieth Century Fox won a libel action against him over a review imputing a knowing sexual appeal to the nine-year-old Shirley Temple's films.

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William Faulkner

American · As I Lay Dying (1930), Absalom, Absalom! (1936)

Faulkner built Yoknapatawpha County across a dozen novels — the same families, the same land, the same inherited catastrophe of slavery, seen from different angles across a century. The prose is long-breathed and syntactically overwhelming, and the narration is fractured across unreliable narrators. Nobel Prize in Literature 1949. In an interview with Russell Warren Howe published on 4 March 1956, he said that if it came to fighting he would fight for Mississippi against the United States even if it meant going into the street and shooting Black people. He wrote to both publications in April 1956 claiming the remarks contained opinions he had never held and statements no sober man would make, and later acknowledged heavy drinking at the time. James Baldwin attacked his gradualist position on desegregation as a false middle.

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Alice Walker

American · The Color Purple (1982), In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (1983)

Walker writes Black Southern women's lives against the systems that constrain them; The Color Purple won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award in 1983. She coined the word “womanist”, and her essays did as much as her fiction to change the field — she is the reason Zora Neale Hurston was recovered. She has also been repeatedly and credibly accused of antisemitism: in a New York Times feature in December 2018 she recommended David Icke's And the Truth Shall Set You Free, a book containing antisemitic conspiracy theory, without qualification, and her 2017 poem about the Talmud reproduces antisemitic tropes. The Anti-Defamation League has described essays in The Cushion in the Road (2013) in similar terms. Her position is that the criticism is an attempt to discredit her advocacy for Palestinians.