Home >> Volume 4, Issue 01  The Bible and a Little History
Warren Cole Smith  Marion Montgomery was not a household name,
but he was responsible for one of Southern literature’s most
quoted definitions. When Flannery O’Connor read his 1962 novel
The Wandering of Desire, she wrote him a letter that became
famous: “I think your book is wonderful, 100 percent solid and
alive throughout. The Southern writer can outwrite anybody in
the country because he has the Bible and a little history, but
you’ve got more of both than most and a splendid gift besides.”
That Marion Montgomery might be remembered for his relationship
to what can reasonably be described as a sound bite is ironic in
the extreme, for Montgomery’s work is anything but reducible to
sound bites. He would often, only half-jokingly, describe the
audience for his work as Milton described his audience: “fit,
though few.” His novels and criticism, running to nearly 30
books, are famously dense, rich, convoluted—anything but
aphoristic.  That quality of h