Wise Blood

Wise Blood is the first novel by the American author Flannery O'Connor, published in 1952. The novel was assembled from disparate stories first published in Mademoiselle, The Sewanee Review and Partisan Review. The first chapter is an expanded version of a story from her Master's thesis, "The Train", and other chapters are reworked versions of "The Peeler", "The Heart of the Park" and "Enoch and the Gorilla". The novel concerns a returning World War II veteran who, haunted by a life-long crisis of faith, resolves to form an anti-religious ministry in an eccentric, fictionalized city in the Southern United States after finding his family homestead abandoned without a trace. The novel received little critical attention when it first appeared but has since come to be appreciated as a classic work of "low comedy and high seriousness" with disturbing religious themes. It was placed 62nd in The Observer's list of 100 greatest novels.