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Why is a soap opera Western like Yellowstone so wildly successful?

The American West with Dan Flores is the latest show from the Meat Eater Podcast Network.

So join me starting Tuesday, May 6th, where we'll delve into stories of the West and come to understand how it helps inform the ways in which we experience the region today.

Listen to the American West with Dan Flores on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Music wherever you get your podcasts. This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star

and the American people, recorded from the city where the west begins, Fort Worth, Texas.

Vonry O'Connor is considered one of America's greatest fiction writers and one of my favorites.

Her stories, they're peopled with a sordid caravan of murderers and thieves and prostitutes and bigots,

whose lives are punctuated by horror and sudden violence.

But the most shocking thing about Fonari O'Connor's fiction is that it is shaped by her

thoroughly Christian vision.

If the world she depicts is dark and terrifying, It is also a place where grace makes itself known.

Here to tell her story is Jonathan Rogers, author of The Terrible Speed of Mercy,

a spiritual biography of Flannery O'Connor.

Let's take a listen.

Flanninger O'Connor was a 20th century writer, best known for her short story. She

also wrote a couple of novels. Her most commonly anthologized short story is a good man

is hard to find. People who've only read one thing by Flannier O'Connor tend to have read

that story. And it's a shocking story. It's a story about a family that is making the trip from Georgia to Florida,

and they have a car accident and run into a serial killer named the Misfit.

And that serial killer, well, kills everybody.

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