American Trappist monk, theologian, and scholar Thomas Merton famously wrote, "When I read Flannery I don't think of Hemingway, or Katherine Anne Porter, or Sartre but rather of someone like Sophocles. What more can be said of a writer? I write her name with honor, for all the truth and all the craft with which she shows man’s fall and his dishonor." TWENTIETH-CENTURY SOPHOCLES explores the relationship between the fiction of Flannery O'Connor and Greek philosophical, tragic, and epic traditions. The text investigates this relationship by examining both the influence of these traditions on O'Connor and also their expression in her work. Included are chapters on the kinship between O'Connor's fiction and Sophocles, Homer, Euripides, Aristotle, and German political philosopher Eric Vogelin. Though she did not enjoy a formal classical education, O'Connor was a keen autodidact in several intellectual traditions, including the Classics. In addition, she absorbed a great deal from Greek and Latin scholar Robert Fitzgerald when she lived with the Fitzgerald family in Redding, Connecticut, for eighteen months.