Novelist Elizabeth Spencer has the Wall Street Journal’s Five Best feature this week, subheadlined:

Elizabeth Spencer chooses her favorite works of Southern fiction

Problem is, none of them were written by Flannery O’Connor.

Look – somebody’s favorites are somebody’s favorites. But the WSJ feature isn’t Five Favorites. It’s Five Best.

Campaign Outsider Rule of Thumb®: When you’re talking about the best of Southern fiction, you have to include O’Connor.

Two quick quotes:

In “Wise Blood,” the Christ-Haunted Hazel Motes says this:

Nobody with a good car needs to be justified by Jesus.

And in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” the Nothing-Haunted Misfit says of the grandmother he just shot:

She would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.

In terms of Southern fiction, it doesn’t get much better than that.