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IN A 2008 ISSUE OFMODERNLANGUAGEQUARTERL DEVOTED TO LITERARY influence, Andrew Elfenbein comments, "Writing about influence turns out to be harder than it looks" ("Defining Influence" 436). I would say that writing about influence is also much more difficult than feeling with certainty that one has recognized influence. Happening upon a passage in an earlier author's work that might have been echoed, however subtly, in Flannery O'Connor's fiction, for instance, is exhilarating. There is a sense of being in the presence of a written voice that O'Connor knew well. The question of influence on such a stylistically striking writer as Flannery O'Connor has, naturally, occupied many readers and scholars. Melvin J. Friedman, for example, finds motivation for O'Connor's "Dickensian devotion to oddity" of characters in François Mauriac's call for a "transpositionof reality and not a reproduction of it" (10) in fiction; Friedman also notes that others, including O'Connor herself, have discussed her connection to Mauriac (10-11). Further influence studies include analyses of O'Connor focused on the impact of the content, style, or thought of the following: Aquinas (Rath), Conrad (Burkman and Meloy), Dostoevsky (McMillan; Hooten), Eliot (Sally Fitzgerald), Gogol (Maus), Hawthorne (Emerick), James (Desmond), Poe (Evans), and West (Sally Fitzgerald). This small sample includes only some of the more widely recognized writers who have attracted the attention of O'Connor scholars. Yet, proving influence or even distinguishing influence from the effects of two authors simply and accidentally using similar images, for example, is sometimes dangerous ground, as Elfenbein implies ("Discrimination" 483) and as some of O'Connor's comments on her readers' suggestions of influence warn them and us. Kathleen Feeley's remarks in her book on the influence of O'Connor's theological readings on her fiction are especially apt, both specifically and generally, for my explorations in this essay: "Because many of the books [in O'Connor's library] are not dated, it is difficult to discern whether other writers inspired ideas in her, or whether their ideas confirmed her own thought" (10-11). Knowing what O'Connor read and when she read it are only two of the many problems with proving influence.
In 1964, very shortly before she died, O'Connor wrote a letter to Marcus Smith in response to his suggestion that Nathanael West figured heavily in her literary development.1 She admits,...