From Letters of Note comes this 1961 letter from Flannery O’Connor to a college English professor:

The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it.

[Picture by Linden Frederick via Zeroing]

Here is a digitized recording of the great Flannery O’Connor reading her story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”

Here’s the text.

[Drawing by David Levine]