A collection of ten short stories by the Southern author Flannery O'Connor.

A young war veteran who returns to a Tennessee mountain town to found a new religion blinds himself with quicklime and in dying finds his own salvation.

Tarwater, a fourteen year old boy, lives with his great-uncle in a cottage in the woods. When the great-uncle dies of old age at the breakfast table, the boy puts the cottage on fire and runs off. After a while he decides to go to his uncle Rayber, a schoolteacher.