With its academic publisher and its promise to explicate works by O’Connor, Updike, Bernard Malamud, and Toni Morrison, Listening for God appears to be a book for literary scholars. Yet while scholars ...

In 1948, Flannery O'Connor and Robert Lowell met at Yaddo, an artists' retreat in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. She was 23, a provincial Southerner working on her first novel.