Everything That Rises Must Converge by O'Connor, Flannery

New York. 1965. Farrar Straus Giroux. 1st Printing. Very Good In Slightly Worn Dustjacket. 105. 269 pages. hardcover. keywords: March 25. inventory # 3578. FROM THE PUBLISHER - The death of Flannery O’Connor at 38 marked the loss of one of America’s most gifted contemporary writers at the height of her powers. This volume is the collection on which she was working at the time of her death. Each of the nine stories carries her highly individual stamp, and could have been written by no one else. ‘Flannery O’Connor’s brilliant talent,’ Elizabeth Hardwick has written, ‘was of that sort that has a contradiction in every pore. She was, indeed, a Catholic writer, and also a Southern writer; but neither of these traditions prepare us for the oddity and beauty of her lonely fiction.’ All but the concluding story in this book are set in the South. The final story, entitled ‘Judgement Day’ and appearing here for the first time anywhere, is about an old man from Corinth, Georgia. Living his last days in New York, he has a horror of death away from home and carries a slip of paper with the message, ‘If found dead, ship express collect’ to Corinth. In the book’s title story, a mother and her son (‘he realized he was too intelligent to be a success’) take a fatal bus ride in their home town; Asbury, the ailing young hero of ‘The Enduring Chill,’ who comes home to die (he thinks), has ‘the last film of illusion torn as if by a whirlwind from his eyes.’ In ‘A View of the Woods,’ a nine-year-old child, made in the image of her seventy-four-year-old grandfather, engages him in mortal combat. Ruby Turpin, the ‘respectable, hardworking, church-going’ heroine of ‘Revelation,’ receives an unwanted glimpse of divine truth in a doctor’s waiting-room. In ‘Greenleaf,’ Mrs. May, another pillar of society who works hard to keep her farm going, proves to be no match for her tenant manager. O. E. Parker, the hero of ‘Parker’s Back,’ who has a Byzantine Christ tattooed on his back, is forced in the end to answer to his full name. The heroes of two of the stories – Thomas, in the relentless ‘The Comforts of Home’ and Sheppard, in ‘The Lame Shall Enter First,’ a terrifying tale of the space-age - have in common good intentions, but in neither case are they realized. EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE is the most worthy memorial that Flannery O’Connor could have left behind to be added to her three previously published books. As Elizabeth Bishop has written, ‘I am sure her few books will live on and on in American literature.’