Four years before E.B. White counseled in his advice on how to write for children that “you have to write up, not down” — a reflection of his general conviction that the writer “should tend to lift people up, not lower them down” — another literary titan made an even more piercing case for the writer’s duty to society and what true art should aim to do for its audience.

That’s what Flannery O’Connor (March 25, 1925–August 3, 1964) explores in a meditation triply timely today, found in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (public library) — the same compendium that gave us her enduring insight on why the grotesque appeals to us.

Writing a few months before her untimely death, O’Connor considers the responsibility that comes with the gift of natural talent:

It is well to remember what is obvious but usually ignored: that every writer has to cope with the possibility in his given talent. Possibility and limitation mean about the same thing. It is the business of every writer to push his talent to its outermost limit, but this means the outermost limit of the kind of talent he has.

She shines a sidewise gleam of admonition, as if peering across time into our present era where intelligent people pour their talent into optimizing cat listicles:

Every day we see people who are busy distorting their talents in order to enhance their popularity or to make money that they could do without.

Three decades before Jeanette Winterson’s elegant opprobrium of “the arrogance of the audience,” O’Connor arrives at her central, searing point about the artist’s responsibility to uphold the integrity of his or her art above the demands of his or her audience:

There are those who maintain that you can’t demand anything of the reader. They say the reader knows nothing about art, and that if you are going to reach him, you have to be humble enough to descend to his level. This supposes either that the aim of art is to teach, which it is not, or that to create anything which is simply a good-in-itself is a waste of time. Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it. We hear a great deal about humility being required to lower oneself, but it requires an equal humility and a real love of the truth to raise oneself and by hard labor to acquire higher standards… Ignorance is excusable when it is borne like a cross, but when it is wielded like an ax, and with moral indignation, then it becomes something else indeed.

Complement Mystery and Manners with O’Connor on the difference between belief and faith, her little-known cartoons, and this rare recording of her reading “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” then revisit JFK on the artist’s role in society and James Baldwin on the artist’s responsibility to culture.