Hulga, a Ph.D. in philosophy with a wooden leg, is seduced and abandoned by a Bible salesman who steals the prosthetic. Flannery O'Connor published this in 1955, and it exemplifies her method: grotesque characters, violent grace, and a theology that offers no comfort. The Bible salesman's nihilism is more honest than Hulga's intellectual pretensions. O'Connor was dying of lupus as she wrote her best work, and her fiction has the urgency of someone who knows that time is short and judgment is coming.