Synopses & Reviews
Winner of the National Book AwardThe publication of this extraordinary volume firmly established Flannery O'Connor's monumental contribution to American fiction. There are thirty-one stories here in all, including twelve that do not appear in the only two story collections O'Connor put together in her short lifetime--Everything That Rises Must Converge and A Good Man Is Hard to Find.
O'Connor published her first story, "The Geranium," in 1946, while she was working on her master's degree at the University of Iowa. Arranged chronologically, this collection shows that her last story, "Judgement Day"--sent to her publisher shortly before her deathis a brilliantly rewritten and transfigured version of "The Geranium." Taken together, these stories reveal a lively, penetrating talent that has given us some of the most powerful and disturbing fiction of the twentieth century. Also included is an introduction by O'Connor's longtime editor and friend, Robert Giroux.
Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925. When she died at the age of thirty-nine, America lost one of its most gifted writers at the height of her powers.
Winner of the National Book Award
The publication of this extraordinary volume firmly established Flannery O'Connor's monumental contribution to American fiction. There are thirty-one stories here in all, including twelve that do not appear in the only two story collections O'Connor put together in her short lifetimeEverything That Rises Must Converge and A Good Man Is Hard to Find.
O'Connor published her first story, "The Geranium," in 1946, while she was working on her master's degree at the University of Iowa. Arranged chronologically, this collection shows that her last story, "Judgement Day"sent to her publisher shortly before her deathis a brilliantly rewritten and transfigured version of "The Geranium." Taken together, these stories reveal a lively, penetrating talent that has given us some of the most powerful and disturbing fiction of the twentieth century. Also included is an introduction by O'Connor's longtime editor and friend, Robert Giroux.
Winner of the National Book Award
"The stories burn brighter than ever, and strike deeper."Walter Clemons, Newsweek
"What we lost when she died is bitter. What we have is astonishing: the stories burn brighter than ever, and strike deeper."Walter Clemons, Newsweek
Review
"She could put everything about a character into a single look, everything she had and knew into a single story...For her, people were complete in their radical weakness, their necessarily human incompleteness. Each story was complete, sentence by sentence. And each sentence was a hard, straight, altogether complete version of her subject: human deficiency, sin, error ugliness taking a physical form." Alfred Kazin
New York Times Book Review, 11/28/71
Review
"One of the greatest writers of our time." Toni Morrison
Review
"What we lost when she died is bitter. What we have is astonishing: the stories burn brighter than ever, and strike deeper." Walter Clemons, Newsweek
Review
"[S]he expressed something secret about America, called 'the South,' with that transcendent gift for expressing the real spirit of a culture..." New York Times Book Review
Synopsis
Winner of the National Book AwardThe publication of this extraordinary volume firmly established Flannery O'Connor's monumental contribution to American fiction. There are thirty-one stories here in all, including twelve that do not appear in the only two story collections O'Connor put together in her short lifetime--Everything That Rises Must Converge and A Good Man Is Hard to Find.
O'Connor published her first story, "The Geranium," in 1946, while she was working on her master's degree at the University of Iowa. Arranged chronologically, this collection shows that her last story, "Judgement Day"--sent to her publisher shortly before her death—is a brilliantly rewritten and transfigured version of "The Geranium." Taken together, these stories reveal a lively, penetrating talent that has given us some of the most powerful and disturbing fiction of the twentieth century. Also included is an introduction by O'Connor's longtime editor and friend, Robert Giroux.
About the Author
Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925. When she died at the age of thirty-nine, America lost one of its most gifted writers at the height of her powers. OConnor wrote two novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960), and two story collections, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1964). Her Complete Stories, published posthumously in 1972, won the National Book Award that year, and in a 2009 online poll it was voted as the best book to have won the award in the contests 60-year history. Her essays were published in Mystery and Manners (1969) and her letters in The Habit of Being (1979). In 1988 the Library of America published her Collected Works; she was the first postwar writer to be so honored. OConnor was educated at the Georgia State College for Women, studied writing at the Iowa Writers Workshop, and wrote much of Wise Blood at the Yaddo artists colony in upstate New York. She lived most of her adult life on her familys ancestral farm, Andalusia, outside Milledgeville, Georgia.
Table of Contents
Introduction by Robert Giroux
The Geranium
The Barber
Wildcat
The Crop
The Turkey
The Train
The Peeler
The Heart of the Park
A Stroke of Good Fortune
Enoch and the Gorilla
A Good Man Is Hard to Find
A Late Encounter with the Enemy
The Life You Save May Be Your Own
The River
A Circle in the Fire
The Displaced Person
A Temple of the Holy Ghost
The Artificial Nigger
Good Country People
You Can't Be Any Poorer Than Dead
Greenleaf
A View of the Woods
The Enduring Chill
The Comforts of Home
Everything That Rises Must Converge
The Partridge Festival
The Lame Shall Enter First
Why Do the Heathen Rage?
Revelation
Parker's Back
Judgement Day