If you’re familiar with Catholic author Flannery O’Connor — especially her prose — you’ll be happy to learn that a partially completed work of hers has just been released.

Those who have discovered O’Connor are aware of her many accomplishments: Three times, she won the O Henry Award for her fiction. In 1972, O’Connor’s Complete Stories won the posthumous U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. It was later voted, in an online poll, the “best book ever to have won the National Book Awards.” There were many more honors, among them the Georgia Writers Association Literary Achievement Award, as well as an alumni achievement award from her alma mater, Georgia State College for Women.

In 1979, director John Huston released a film starring Gene Kelly, and based on O’Connor’s first novel, Wise Blood. In that novel a young atheist, recently released from the Army, attempts to found the first-ever “Holy Church of Christ Without Christ.”

When 39-year-old Flannery died of lupus in 1964 following surgery for a uterine fibroid, the Catholic writer left behind a great body of work including more than 30 short stories and two published books. Also among her papers was a third novel, still unfinished, titled Why Do the Heathen Rage?

For years, that unfinished novel remained unpublished. Eventually, a five-page excerpt from Why Do the Heathen Rage? was released as a short story by the same name, in O’Connor’s The Complete Stories.

But author and editor Jessica Hooten Wilson was unsatisfied knowing that so much of the writer’s work had been left behind after her death, stuffed in folders and drawers and stacked erratically on her desktop. Wilson had first been exposed to the writing of Flannery O’Connor while still in high school, when a teacher presented her with one of O’Connor’s stories and said, “If you’re a Christian, write like this.”

The author remained a lifelong source of inspiration for Wilson. Years later, as a young professional, Wilson met Flannery’s friend William “Billy” Sessions and other O’Connor scholars. Billy Sessions was the first to tell her that Flannery had left an unfinished novel; and excited by the prospect of learning something new about the author she admired, Jessica Wilson set out to examine Flannery’s unfinished work. Wilson first visited Flannery’s archives, near the author’s home in Milledgeville, Georgia, in 2009. Over the next 10 years, she visited the archives frequently, reading and reviewing and organizing short stories, paragraphs, even brief sentences, determining the most logical arrangement of ideas and events in hopes of assembling the story as Flannery had intended.

The product of Jessica Hooten Wilson’s long labor is a new book, Flannery O’Connor’s “Why Do the Heathen Rage?”: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at a Work in Progress (Brazos Press, 2024). Included is unpublished writing by Flannery O’Connor herself with her imbedded morality and her characteristic sardonic wit. The text had been uncovered and organized by Wilson, but the novel is, as noted, unfinished. Interspersed with O’Connor’s writings are comments and analyses by Wilson. In one personal note, Wilson comments on the history of the work, pointing to news stories (particularly racial tensions and societal changes) that would have helped to shape O’Connor’s thought. In another section, Wilson explains how the same character may have had one name in the first chapter of O’Connor’s book, and then another name later on. Had O’Connor lived to complete the work, she would in the end have chosen a single name by which her character would be remembered by all.

Wilson’s commentary offers so much that the reader may not have known. For example, the title “Why Do the Heathen Rage?” is drawn from the Bible, where it appears twice, in both the Old and New Testaments. The quotations were marked and underscored in Flannery’s personal copy of the Douay-Rheims Bible: first in Psalm 2:1, when King David asks why people, especially those in powerful positions, scheme in vain against God and his people; second in Acts 4:25, when a group of converts celebrates the release of the apostles Peter and John from the threats of the Jewish Sanhedrin.