Identify the Stylist

[For the previous round of this game, click here.]

Think of this as the literary equivalent of the old game show Name That Tune.  Can you identify the author of the following passage based on its stylistic hallmarks?

"Well, as long as you have such a good disposition," the stylish lady said [to Mrs. Turpin in the doctor's waiting room], "I don't think it makes a bit of difference what size you are.  You just can't beat a good disposition."

Next to her was a fat girl of eighteen or nineteen, scowling into a thick blue book which Mrs. Turpin saw was entitled Human Development.  The girl raised her head and directed her scowl at Mrs. Turpin as if she did not like her looks.  She appeared annoyed that anyone should speak while she tried to read.  The poor girl's face was blue with acne and Mrs. Turpin thought how pitiful it was to have a face like that at that age.  She gave the girl a friendly smile but the girl only scowled the harder.  Mrs. Turpin herself was fat, but she had always had good skin, and, though she was forty-seven years old, there was not a wrinkle in her face except around her eyes from laughing too much.

Next to the ugly girl was the child, still exactly in the same position, and next to him was a thin leathery old woman in a cotton print dress.  She and Claud had three sacks of chicken feed in their pump house that was in the same print.  She had seen from the first that the child belonged with the old woman.  She could tell by the way they sat--kind of vacant and white-trashy, as if they would sit there until Doomsday if nobody called and told them to get up.  And at right angles but next to the well-dressed pleasant lady was a lank-faced woman who was certainly the child's mother.  She had on a yellow sweat-shirt and wine-colored slacks, both gritty-looking, and the rims of her lips were stained with snuff.  Her dirty yellow hair was tied behind with a little piece of red paper ribbon.  Worse than niggers any day, Mrs. Turpin thought.

The gospel hymn playing was, "When I looked up and He looked down," and Mrs. Turpin, who knew it, supplied the last line mentally, "And wona these days I know I'll we-eara crown."

(Keep scrolling down to find out the author of this passage)


The subtly comic detail (e.g. a fat girl reading a "thick" book titled Human Development)...


The portraits of grotesque characters (such as the woman with snuff-stained lips)...


The ironic distance between the author and the viewpoint character (who is shown to be biased and falsely pious)...


The use of religion for thematic effect...


...This has to be the work of Flannery O'Connor.

(The passage comes from her 1964 short story "Revelation" [p. 490 in The Complete Stories]).