Flannery O'Connor's (supposed) outsider status gives her street cred

Every (serious) writing class I've been in has had someone like Flannery O'Connor in the group. There's usually been a bunch of self-counsciously artistic/creative types who look both aware and deep and whom you immediately pick out as the players, the competition, the ones who are miles down the road toward the the great American novel or epic poem, but there's always at least one, sitting on the margins, quiet, withdrawn, maybe a bit frumpy (if a woman) or disheveled (if a guy), often a bit younger (or older) than the rest, easy to dismiss, and then, wham!, they present their work and blow you away: knockout poem that's going to stay with you for 50 years, or a story so funny that the writer himself can hardly read it aloud to the seminar without laughing to tears. That's how I imagine O'Connor was at Iowa and after. You'd think, what's she doing here? Has she wandered over from the ag college? And then her stories, the chapters of her novel - truly unlike anything before or since, and that's part of their power. Could a Fitzgerald or a Lowell or a Bellow or a Doctorow write about her characters and get away with it? Obviously not. O'Connor's supposed "outsider" status (well cultivated, she was much more inside than most suppose) gives her a certain cred, so that when we read about the grotesques in "Wise Blood" and elsewhere we accept them, figuring she knew her turf. Yes, I believe she did. As a portrait of a knot of southern eccentrics, Wise Blood is amazing, but what about as a religous and philosophical tome? The characters are not symbols, nor should they be nor are the meant to be. But in what sense are they going through a spiritual struggle and crisis? Isn't more like their little bugs on a glass jar, into which O'Connor drops a match to watch them squirm? She's a great author but a cruel god.