The sixth and final story in Flannery O’Connor’s 1947 master’s thesis collection, “The Train,” is a somewhat gothic tale in which nineteen-year old Hazel (Haze) Wickers suffers social awkwardness and nighttime terror during a train ride for undisclosed reasons to Taulkinham. O’Connor readers will recognize Haze, with his last name changed to Motes, as the protagonist who will reappear in the novel Wise Blood; in this short story appearance, however, Haze—like his later incarnation—proves himself to be on the run from something in his past but now finds himself agitated by his surroundings and other people.

Confronted and inexplicably annoyed by everyone else on the train—including Mrs.

The fourth story in Flannery O’Connor’s master’s thesis collection comes as no surprise in that it is somewhat typical of apprentice stories by young authors. As happens in such stories, the protagonist is a struggling writer, becoming a rather obvious projection of the story’s author.

In “The Crop,” O’Connor’s projection is forty-four year old Miss Willerton, the kind of woman people once labeled by society as a “spinster.” Willie, as she is known to her family (with whom she lives—although some critics have erroneously suggested she lives in a boardinghouse with people who are not her relatives), aspires to write stories and novels.

My reading of the third story in Flannery O’Connor’s 1947 thesis collection prompts me to make the following observations:

(1) This is perhaps the weakest story in O’Connor’s thesis collection.

(2) Blind Gabriel, both as young boy and as old man in the story, with his thinly disguised fear of the wildcat, gives readers something to think about—especially in terms of his claim of a primal awareness of matters beyond normal sensibility, and in terms of his thin veneer of courage that barely covers a not-so-insensible fear of something out there (ostensibly the wildcat)—but Gabriel’s story is encumbered by the author’s attempts at dialect (not very well managed) and the characters’ dialogue and diction (also not well managed).

(3) Again, with apologies to O’Connor, the influences of William Faulkner and Erskine Cauldwell are everywhere evident in the derivative and awkward (but mercifully short) “Wildcat.”

(4) If I had been her thesis advisor (which is a fanciful time-travel imagining that is presumptuous on a variety of levels), I would say, “Ms.

In the second story from Flannery O’Connor’s master’s thesis collection, which includes a total of six stories, the protagonist Rayber makes a serious mistake by arguing politics during several visits to his neighborhood barbershop. The small town college professor boasts that he will vote for candidate Darmon, an apparently integrationist liberal in the upcoming Democrat primary; others in the barbershop who champion Darmon’s more traditional southern segregationist opponent, Hawkson, deride and taunt Rayber by asking him, “You a nigger-lover?”

Rayber fails to understand or accept the attitudes of those he regards as rude and ignorant, and he remains convinced that he can either convert or enlighten his critics by offering rational, sensible argument in support of his superior position.

In one of Flannery O’Connor’s earliest stories featuring Christian grace as a theme, young Ruller wanders about on the outskirts of his small hometown as he imagines himself instead to be in the old West and on the trail of cattle rustlers. Then, quite suddenly, a dying turkey that apparently had been shot by a hunter stumbles into Ruller’s view and intrudes in profound ways upon his make-believe world.

While Ruller doggedly pursues the mortally wounded fowl through the hedges and brambles, and while imagining himself to be the hero of his family and the townspeople when he returns with a turkey for dinner, this young son of an apparently strict Christian family carelessly entertains himself with guilty, immature, profane pleasures.