The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor

In 1988, the Library of America published Collected Works of Flannery O'Connor, the first so honored postwar writer. Survivors published her letters in The Habit of Being (1979). Her Complete Stories, published posthumously in 1972, won the national book award for that year. Survivors published her essays were published in Mystery and Manners (1969). When she died at the age of 39 years, America lost one of its most gifted writers at the height of her powers. O’Connor wrote Everything That Rises Must Converge (1964). She lived most of her adult life on Andalusia, ancestral farm of her family outside Milledgeville, Georgia. The Georgia state college for women educated O’Connor, who then studied writing at the Iowa writers' workshop and wrote much of Wise Blood at the colony of artists at Yaddo in upstate New York. Also included is an introduction by O'Connor's longtime editor and friend, Robert Giroux.Ĭritics note novels Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960) and short stories, collected in such works as A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955), of American writer Mary Flannery O'Connor for their explorations of religious faith and a spare literary style. 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.

O'Connor published her first story, 'The Geranium,' in 1946, while she was working on her master's degree at the University of Iowa. 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.

The publication of this extraordinary volume firmly established Flannery O'Connor's monumental contribution to American fiction.

The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor