‘His heart constricted with a repulsion for himself so clear and intense that he gasped for breath. He had stuffed his own emptiness with good works like a glutton.’ In ‘The Lame Shall Enter First’, one of the unforgettable stories in this collection, a widower realises that the charity of which he has been so indignantly proud was but a means of stifling his grief. The violent epiphany that seizes him comes too late – the tragedies wrought by self-delusion and hubris may, finally, be understood, but they may not always be repaired. This is the central theme of Flannery O’Connor’s coruscating, plain-speaking fiction: the painful, necessary salvation that emerges from catastrophic, life-changing, and sometimes life-ending, events. O’Connor was the first fiction writer born in the 20th century to have her works collected and published by the Library of America. She grew up in a Roman Catholic family in Savannah, Georgia and stated that her writing was an expression of her religious commitment. Her characters are torn between the sensory and the spiritual, many of them gripped by morbid preoccupations as they attempt unsuccessfully to unite these dual impulses. Warped park guard Enoch Emery performs ritualistic tours, spying on female bathers and aggravating the animals at the zoo, awaiting the sign that will tell him to reveal the ‘mystery’ at ‘The Heart of the Park’. Many are fanatics, like the blind preacher in ‘The Peeler’. They, and their stories, are comic-grotesque, intertwining glimpses of the transcendental world with physical and psychological horror. This selection includes ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ and ‘Everything that Rises Must Converge’, two of O’Connor’s best-known works. Deanna Staffo’s powerful illustrations capture O’Connor’s Southern settings and macabre, surrealistic style. In a compelling introduction, American author C. E. Morgan, selected as one of The New Yorker’s prestigious ‘20 Under 40’ writers, explores the stories’ uncompromising, idiosyncratic wisdom.
Author
Critics 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. 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. She lived most of her adult life on Andalusia, ancestral farm of her family outside Milledgeville, Georgia. O’Connor wrote Everything That Rises Must Converge (1964). When she died at the age of 39 years, America lost one of its most gifted writers at the height of her powers. Survivors published her essays were published in Mystery and Manners (1969). Her Complete Stories , published posthumously in 1972, won the national book award for that year. Survivors published her letters in The Habit of Being (1979). In 1988, the Library of America published Collected Works of Flannery O'Connor, the first so honored postwar writer. People in an online poll in 2009 voted her Complete Stories as the best book to win the national book award in the six-decade history of the contest.
