The Complete Stories
by Flannery O'Connor
Summary
Thirty one stories, everything Flannery O'Connor wrote in the form, from her 1947 master's thesis pieces to the stories she was revising on her deathbed, arranged in order of composition so the reader can watch one of the strangest talents in American literature arrive almost fully formed and then deepen.
The famous ones are all here. A Good Man Is Hard to Find, in which a vacationing family's detour delivers them to an escaped convict called The Misfit, and a vain old woman reaches the only true moment of her life at gunpoint. Good Country People, where a nihilist PhD with a wooden leg is undone by a Bible salesman worse than anything she believes. The Displaced Person, her longest, a Polish refugee's arrival quietly dismantling a Georgia dairy farm. Everything That Rises Must Converge, the desegregating bus, the mother, the penny, and the son whose enlightenment is its own damnation. And Revelation, Mrs Turpin in the doctor's waiting room, thanking Jesus for making her exactly who she is until a Wellesley girl throws a book at her head, and the vision of souls marching to heaven in reverse order of respectability.
O'Connor called her method large and startling figures: comedy at full violence, the sacred arriving through gunshots, gorings and strokes, everyone's virtue a costume and grace the intruder that strips it.
Around five hundred and fifty pages.
Best for readers who want the American short story at its absolute peak, and can stand fiction in which redemption and catastrophe are routinely the same event.
Historical Context & Significance
The Complete Stories won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1972, seven years after Flannery O'Connor's death, and in 2009, when the award's sixtieth anniversary sent a ballot of past fiction winners, chosen by writers associated with the Foundation, to a public vote, this book won that too, named the Best of the National Book Awards Fiction.
O'Connor died of lupus in 1964 at thirty nine, on the Georgia farm where she raised peacocks and wrote in the mornings as the disease allowed, leaving two novels and the two collections, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and the posthumous Everything That Rises Must Converge, that this volume absorbs along with the apprentice work and uncollected pieces.
Her Catholic reading of her own grotesques, laid out in the essays of Mystery and Manners and the letters of The Habit of Being, now travels with the fiction as a matched set, and the stories themselves have never left print, never left syllabuses, and never been successfully imitated.