Wise Blood was published by Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, on 15 May 1952, in a first printing of approximately 3,000 copies priced at $3.00. O’Connor was twenty-seven — already suffering from the lupus that would kill her at thirty-nine — and had been working on the novel since 1947 at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The book received bewildered reviews: critics recognised its power but couldn’t categorise it. Was it a comedy? A religious parable? Southern Gothic? All three, and something else entirely.
The Novel
Hazel Motes — twenty-two years old, recently discharged from the army, grandson of a circuit-riding preacher — arrives in Taulkinham, a small city in the Deep South, determined to prove that he does not believe in Jesus. He founds the “Church Without Christ” and preaches from the hood of his rat-coloured Essex automobile that “there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from and no Redemption because there was no Fall and no Judgment because there wasn’t the first two.” He is pursued by Enoch Emery (a zoo guard with “wise blood” — animal instinct — who steals a mummy from a museum as a “new jesus”), by Sabbath Lily Hawks (the promiscuous daughter of a blind preacher who is not actually blind), and by Hoover Shoats (a con man who tries to commercialise Haze’s church).
The novel is savage, grotesque, and very funny — O’Connor’s comedy operates through the collision of absolute conviction with absolute absurdity. Haze’s denial of God is itself a form of faith: he cannot stop talking about the Jesus he claims not to believe in. The novel’s terrible conclusion — Haze blinds himself with quicklime, wraps barbed wire around his chest, fills his shoes with gravel, and dies — is simultaneously a horror and a grace: the God he fled has caught him.
O’Connor later wrote: “For the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.” Her fiction operates through shock, violence, and grotesque comedy because she believed her audience was spiritually deaf — deaf to grace, deaf to mystery, deaf to the radical demands of faith.
Collecting Wise Blood
First edition (1952, Harcourt, Brace): Approximately 3,000 copies, priced at $3.00.
Identification points:
- “First edition” on the copyright page (with Harcourt’s characteristic code)
- Published by Harcourt, Brace and Company
- Red cloth boards
- Dust jacket: distinctive illustration (varies by state)
First edition, first printing:
- Fine/Fine in dust jacket: $5,000–$15,000
- Near Fine in jacket: $2,000–$5,000
- Without jacket: $300–$800
Signed copies: O’Connor signed books primarily for friends, at readings, and for correspondence. She was physically limited (lupus required crutches from her mid-twenties) and did not conduct extensive tours. Signed copies: $8,000–$20,000.
Value trajectory (2016–2026): Approximately 2× for fine copies in jacket. O’Connor’s canonical status has grown steadily as her work is recognised as among the most powerful American fiction of the twentieth century.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this a religious novel? Absolutely — though not in any conventional sense. O’Connor was a devout Catholic writing for a secular audience. The novel insists on the reality of God with a violence that makes most “religious fiction” seem sentimental. Haze’s atheism is the beginning of his salvation, not its opposite.
Is this a comedy? Yes — darkly, ferociously. O’Connor’s humour is of the Southern grotesque variety: exaggeration, physical absurdity, and the collision of pomposity with reality. The laughter is never comfortable.
What is “wise blood”? Enoch Emery’s phrase for animal instinct — the body’s knowledge that bypasses intellect. It is a kind of grace that operates through the flesh rather than through the mind.