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Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works

Wise Blood | A Good Man Is Hard to Find | The Violent Bear It Away | Everything That Rises Must Converge | selected essays and letters More

Edited by Sally Fitzgerald

“Nothing O’Connor wrote was ever lukewarm. Not a tepid sentence of hers exists…. If I were to be consigned to that mythical desert island with only a bottle of some brand of aspirin and one book, I suspect the Collected Works of Flannery O’Connor might be my choice.” — Doris Grumbach, National Public Radio

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview

Interviews “That Difficult Work of Digging”: Jessica Hooten Wilson on Flannery O’Connor’s Final, Unfinished Novel
February 16, 2024

Interviews New “passion project” documentary Flannery reveals the writer who revealed mysteries
March 5, 2020

Interviews Brad Gooch: Flannery O’Connor’s apocalyptic tall tales “give us the news that we need to hear”
July 9, 2018

In her short lifetime, Flannery O’Connor became one of the most distinctive American writers of the twentieth century. By birth a native of Georgia and a Roman Catholic, O’Connor depicts, in all its comic and horrendous incongruity, the limits of worldly wisdom and the mysteries of divine grace in the “Christ-haunted” Protestant South. This Library of America collection, the most comprehensive ever published, contains all of her novels and short-story collections, as well as nine other stories, eight of her most important essays, and a selection of 259 witty, spirited, and revealing letters, 21 published here for the first time.

Her fiction brilliantly explores the human obsession with seemingly banal things. It might be a new hat or clean hogs or, for Hazel Motes, hero of Wise Blood (1952), an automobile. “Nobody with a good car needs to be justified,” Hazel assures himself while using its hood for a pulpit to preach his “Church Without Christ.” As in O’Connor’s subsequent work, the characters in this novel are driven to violence, even murder, and their strong vernacular endows them with the discomforting reality of next-door neighbors. “In order to recognize a freak,” she remarks in one of her essays, “you have to have a conception of the whole man.”

In the title story of her first, dazzling collection of stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955), the old grandmother discovers the comic irrelevance of good manners when she and her family meet up with the sinister Misfit, who claims there is “no pleasure but meanness.” The terror of urban dislocation in “The Artificial Nigger,” the bizarre baptism in “The River,” or one-legged Hulga Hopewell’s encounter with a Bible salesman in “Good Country People”—these startling events give readers the uneasy sense of mysteries about to be revealed.

Her second novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960), casts the shadow of the Old Testament across a landscape of backwoods shacks, modern towns, and empty highways. Caught between the prophetic fury of his great-uncle and the unrelenting rationalism of his uncle, 14-year-old Francis Tarwater undergoes a terrifying trial of faith when he is commanded to baptize his idiot cousin.

The nine stories in Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) show O’Connor’s powers at their height. The title story is a terrifying, heart-rending drama of familial and racial misunderstanding. “Revelation” and “The Enduring Chill” probe further into conflicts between parental figures and recalcitrant offspring, where as much tension is generated from quiet conversation as from the physical violence of gangsters and fanatics.

Sally Fitzgerald (1917–2002), volume editor, edited The Habit of Being, a collection of O’Connor’s letters, and, with Robert Fitzgerald, Mystery and Manners, a selection of O’Connor’s occasional prose.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works is kept in print by a gift from the Geoffrey C. Hughes Foundation to the Guardians of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

Interviews “That Difficult Work of Digging”: Jessica Hooten Wilson on Flannery O’Connor’s Final, Unfinished Novel
February 16, 2024

Interviews New “passion project” documentary Flannery reveals the writer who revealed mysteries
March 5, 2020

Interviews Brad Gooch: Flannery O’Connor’s apocalyptic tall tales “give us the news that we need to hear”
July 9, 2018

The Moviegoer Faith and faithfulness in John Huston’s Wise Blood
October 6, 2016
Table of Contents

Wise Blood

A Good Man Is Hard to Find
A Good Man Is Hard to Find
The River
The Life You Save May Be Your Own
A Stroke of Good Fortune
A Temple of the Holy Ghost
The Artificial Nigger
A Circle in the Fire
A Late Encounter with the Enemy
Good Country People
The Displaced Person

The Violent Bear It Away

Everything That Rises Must Converge
Everything That Rises Must Converge
Greenleaf
A View of the Woods
The Enduring Chill
The Comforts of Home
The Lame Shall Enter First
Revelation
Parker’s Back
Judgment Day

Stories and Occasional Prose

The Geranium: A Collection of Short Stories (1947)
The Geranium
The Barber
Wildcat
The Crop
The Turkey
The Train
An Afternoon in the Woods (1954)
The Partridge Festival (1961)
Why Do the Heathen Rage? (1963)
The Fiction Writer and His Country (1957)
The Church and the Fiction Writer (1960)
Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction (1961)
Introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann (1961)
The King of the Birds (1961)
The Regional Writer (1963)
Fiction Is a Subject with a History—It Should Be Taught That Way (1963)
The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South (1963)

Letters

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ISBN: 978-0-94045037-0 1281 pages

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