Flannery O'Connor and Cold War Culture offers a radically new reading of O'Connor, who is known primarily as the creator of "universal" religious dramas. By recovering the historical context in which O'Connor wrote her fiction, Jon Lance Bacon reveals an artist deeply concerned with the issues that engaged other producers of American culture from the 1940s to the 1960s: a national identity, political anxiety, and intellectual freedom. Bacon takes an interdisciplinary approach, relating the stories and novels to political texts and sociological studies, as well as films, television programs,...