Rating: 
Summary: A literary voice silenced way too early.
Review: Flannery O'Connor did not even live to see her 40th birthday; she died, in 1964, of lupus, the same inflammatory disease which had killed her father when she was a mere teenager and which all too soon began to cripple her as well. A graduate of the Iowa State University's journalism and writing program, she had started to write her first stories, poems and other pieces when she was still in high school, and had submitted a collection of six short stories entitled "The Geranium" as her master's thesis in university. (Most of the stories contained in that collection were published individually in various magazines and anthologies around the time of their inclusion in the thesis; the collection as a whole, however, was first published only posthumously in the National Book Award winning "Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor.") Only a few years after having obtained her master's degree, and after a prolonged residence at Yaddo artists' colony in upstate New York, O'Connor began to spend time in hospitals and, in due course, was diagnosed with lupus. From that moment on, she focused on her writing even more than she had before - and the result were two novels, two short story collections, several stand-alone short stories, essays and other pieces of occasional prose, as well as a barrage of letters. The majority of that work product, including twenty-one previously unpublished letters, is reproduced in this collection published in the Library of America series; notably, the fiction part also includes, as one piece, O'Connor's master's thesis, "The Geranium: A Collection of Short Stories."A native of Georgia, Flannery O'Connor defined herself as much as a Catholic writer as a Southerner; and she commented on the impact that regional influences on the one hand and her religion on the other hand had had on her writing in the 1963 essays "The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South" and "The Regional Writer." Yet, while religion (and more specifically, Catholicism) certainly plays a big part in her writing, from the "Christian malgre lui," as she herself characterized the hero of her first novel "Wise Blood" in the Author's Note to book's 1962 second edition, to the "odd folks out" and searching souls populating her short stories, and to her frequent biblical references, it would not do her writing justice to limit her to that realm, nor to that of "Southern" fiction. (No matter for which specific dramatic purpose a writer employed a Southern setting, he would still be considered to be writing about the South in general, and was thus left to get rid off the label of a "Southern writer ... and all the misconceptions that go with it" as best he could, she quipped in her 1960 essay "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction." Rather, she added three years later in "The Regional Writer," location matters to an author insofar as any author "operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet," and it is up to him to find that precise spot and apply it to his writing.) Similarly, while her heroes are certainly not the kind of people you expect to meet on your daily errands (or do you?), it would shortchange them were we to succumb to the temptation of merely defining them as some particularly colorful examples of grotesque fiction. For one thing, "[t]o be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man," as O'Connor noted in "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction." More fundamentally, however, she saw her calling - and that of any Southern author treading the same ground as William Faulkner and trying not to have their "mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down" - as an attempt to reach below the surface of the human existence to that realm "which is the concern of prophets and poets," and to strike a balance between realism on the one hand and vision, poetry and compassion on the other; to recognize the expectations of his readers without making himself their slave. Thus, the famously unexpected endings of Flannery O'Connor's narratives are more than merely weird plot twists, the encounter between the grandmother and The Misfit in the title story of her first published short story collection "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" (1955) is the result of a wrong turn in the road as much as that of a series of wrong choices, coincidences and essential miscommunications, and the title story of her second, posthumously published collection of short stories "Everything That Rises Must Converge" (1965) truly does indicate more than a physical proposition and indeed, a situation applicable to the entire world, as O'Connor wrote in a 1961 letter regarding the initial publication of the collection's title story in New World Writing. A six-time winner of the O. Henry Award for Short Fiction and winner of the posthumously awarded 1972 National Book Award for her Collected Short Stories, in her short career as a writer Flannery O'Connor left an indelible mark on American literature, far transcending the borders of her native South. We can only speculate what she would have contributed had illness and death not intervened - and in a time when, as O'Connor wrote so prophetically in "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction," too many writers abandon vision and instead contend themselves with satisfying their readers' more pedestrian expectations, her contributions would doubtless be invaluable. Alas, we are left with a body of work that fits neatly into this marvelously edited single-volume entry in the "Library of America" series - but the content of this one book alone is worth manifold that of the much ampler output of many a writer of recent years.
Rating:
Summary: The Best
Review: Flannery O'Connor was the best short-story writer of the 20th century. This collection contains all of her wonderful short stories, her sadly underappreciated novel WISE BLOOD, and one of the most entertaining and enlightening selections from an author's letters I've ever come across.
Rating:
Summary: The Best
Review: Flannery O'Connor was the best short-story writer of the 20th century. This collection contains all of her wonderful short stories, her sadly underappreciated novel WISE BLOOD, and one of the most entertaining and enlightening selections from an author's letters I've ever come across.
Rating: 
Summary: GOOD WORK BUT USER UNFRIENDLY
Review: If you are looking for a comprehensive collection of Flannery O'Connor's works search no further. This excellent volume contains all of the best of O'Connor's writings in addition to her letters. You couldn't ask for a better resource for those who are O'Connor fans and for those who are teaching any courses about Flannery O'Connor. The major criticism that I have of this book is not content but the way it is put together. Ordinarily you would have an index in the front of the book. In this case the index is at the end and the stories are not in a systematic order to make it easier for the reader to find. I am surprised that there is not at least a one page introduction about the author to help put her work in historical perspective and introduce her to new readers. Those are the "major" technical flaws that I find with the book otherwise it is a must have volume to have in your personal library.
Rating:
Summary: The 20th Century's greatest literary force.
Review: Move over Hemingway, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Stein, Wolfe and, yes, even William Faulkner. Flannery O'connor is the greatest American literary mind that the 20th Century ever produced. Upon completing this magisterial collection of her work, superbly edited and finely bound by the American Library, the reader will no doubt fall under the spell of Flannery O'Connor just as I did when I first read "Parker's back" upon a whim after browsing listlessly through a bookstore. It took me about a 1/2 hour with a cup of coffee by my side to leaf through the story, and from that time forward I was forever captivated by everything to do with Flannery. The only other reading experience I've had that can even come close to Flannery's bludgeoning me between the eyes with her descriptive pen-hammer was when I first read "Bartleby the Scrivener" by Herman Melville. And when your a writer who's style and vision lends itself to the bizarre and the grotesque, while all the while maintaining a thoroughly moral underpinning to your work, there is no better company to be in than this greatest of 19th century American writers. Read this woman! You will not go away empty-minded. After being thoroughly entertained, you will only go away much wiser and completely satisfied. I guarantee it.
Rating:
Summary: The 20th Century's greatest literary force.
Review: Move over Hemingway, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Stein, Wolfe and, yes, even William Faulkner. Flannery O'connor is the greatest American literary mind that the 20th Century ever produced. Upon completing this magisterial collection of her work, superbly edited and finely bound by the American Library, the reader will no doubt fall under the spell of Flannery O'Connor just as I did when I first read "Parker's back" upon a whim after browsing listlessly through a bookstore. It took me about a 1/2 hour with a cup of coffee by my side to leaf through the story, and from that time forward I was forever captivated by everything to do with Flannery. The only other reading experience I've had that can even come close to Flannery's bludgeoning me between the eyes with her descriptive pen-hammer was when I first read "Bartleby the Scrivener" by Herman Melville. And when your a writer who's style and vision lends itself to the bizarre and the grotesque, while all the while maintaining a thoroughly moral underpinning to your work, there is no better company to be in than this greatest of 19th century American writers. Read this woman! You will not go away empty-minded. After being thoroughly entertained, you will only go away much wiser and completely satisfied. I guarantee it.
Rating:
Summary: a lovely book
Review: Oh yes! I adore her, and so do my mum and dad. They talk about her all of the time, and so I grew up with the prose ringing in my ears. I am so pleased to be reading her now.
Rating:
Summary: Just Read It All
Review: The complaints about the poor organization of the collection can be overcome by simply reading it from front to back. Surely it is that good.
My foray into the works of Flannery O'Connor, a southern, gothic author of darkly humorous novels and short stories came via a recommendation in Harold Bloom's, "What to Read and Why." As it turned ot, I had read one of her short stories, "A Good Man is Hard to Find," in a collection somewhere and had been surprised and shocked, by the turn of events and ending of the story, so much so, that I remembered it instantly, even though it has to have been thirty years since I read it. I enjoyed everything, short stories, novellas, and even her letters. She writes about southern Christ-haunted people, most backward, all damned, but many redeemed. Bloom says that according to her, we are all damned but one should put that aside and simply enjoy her beautiful, grotesque, and wonderful comedic stories. Her protagonist is often a woman, forced to take on a role and duties she didn't sign up for but resignedly and with no illusions playing and discharging both out of a sense of morality or necessity; those women are usually the most superior beings in her stories.
Many of her insights stick with me months afterwards. For example, O'Connor says in one of her letters, "...Hazel's integrity lies in his not being able to do so. Does one's integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do? I think that usually it does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to deepen." That brought tears to my eyes -- perhaps because it is so beautifully put.
Rating:
Summary: One of America's greatest writers
Review: The cover blurbs on my old O'Connor paperbacks always refer to the "humor" of her stories. Well, if this is humor, then the reviewers have pretty sick minds. What you get nearly every time with Flannery is a story that drags you over broken glass and down red-clay roads and introduces you to some people with severe religious issues and sado-masochistic channels for expressing them. Much is made of Flannery's Catholicism, mostly by ignorant secular reviewers who wouldn't even notice the discrepancy of a crucifix standing behind a black Baptist choir in a Madonna video. But in her fiction, O'Connor's Christianity is a bizarre, doctrineless ooze that characters absorb or battle with, but not in a way that most writers on religion would recognize. Flannery is too clever for that, combining scary medieval flagellent self-denigration with Bible-belt paranoia. You can't even start talking about American literature until you've read Flannery.
Rating:
Summary: One of America's greatest writers
Review: The cover blurbs on my old O'Connor paperbacks always refer to the "humor" of her stories. Well, if this is humor, then the reviewers have pretty sick minds. What you get nearly every time with Flannery is a story that drags you over broken glass and down red-clay roads and introduces you to some people with severe religious issues and sado-masochistic channels for expressing them. Much is made of Flannery's Catholicism, mostly by ignorant secular reviewers who wouldn't even notice the discrepancy of a crucifix standing behind a black Baptist choir in a Madonna video. But in her fiction, O'Connor's Christianity is a bizarre, doctrineless ooze that characters absorb or battle with, but not in a way that most writers on religion would recognize. Flannery is too clever for that, combining scary medieval flagellent self-denigration with Bible-belt paranoia. You can't even start talking about American literature until you've read Flannery.
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