Can Wildcat do Flannery O’Connor justice?

Published September 20, 2023 5:45pm ET



On March 1, 1957, CBS televised Flannery O’Connor’s short story The Life You Save May Be Your Own, starring Gene Kelly and Agnes Moorehead. In the original story, a one-armed handyman named Mr. Shiftlet agrees to marry a woman’s handicapped daughter if he can keep her rundown car. Not caring much for the civil union, he abandons the girl in a bar and drives away to face the fury of God, symbolically spinning toward him in a tornado.

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