What <em>The New Yorker </em>Didn’t Say About a Famous Writer’s Anti-Semitism

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Whatever your views on “cancel culture,” one thing is certain: Search-and-rescue missions on behalf of the disappeared can take strange forms. Witness a 2020 New Yorker essay that was published online under the title “How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?” The question suggested the possibility that something as vile as racism might be calibrated—and that O’Connor’s case had moved from the verdict to the sentencing phase. Was she un-racist enough that “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” could still be taught in English classes, or was she so racist that all copies of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” should be collected and destroyed?

But if you read past the title, the essay—by Paul Elie, a senior fellow at Georgetown’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs—turns out to be excellent, a model of the form. It neither shies away from