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Everything That Rises Must Converge: Stories (FSG Classics) Paperback – January 1, 1965

by Flannery O'Connor (Author), Robert Fitzgerald (Introduction)

4.5 400 ratings

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Flannery O'Connor was working on Everything That Rises Must Converge at the time of her death. This collection is an exquisite legacy from a genius of the American short story, in which she scrutinizes territory familiar to her readers: race, faith, and morality. The stories encompass the comic and the tragic, the beautiful and the grotesque; each carries her highly individual stamp and could have been written by no one else.

Review

“The current volume of posthumous stories is the work of a master, a writer's writer-- but a reader's too-- an incomparable craftsman who wrote, let it be said, some of the finest stories in our language.” ―Newsweek

“All in all they comprise the best collection of shorter fiction to have been published in America during the past twenty years.” ―Theodore Solotaroff, Book Week

“When I read Flannery O'Connor, I do not think of Hemingway, or Katherine Anne Porter, or Sartre, but rather of someone like Sophocles. What more can you say for a writer? I write her name with honor, for all the truth and all the craft with which she shows man's fall and his dishonor.” ―Thomas Merton

About the Author

Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925. When she died at the age of thirty-nine, America lost one of its most gifted writers at the height of her powers. O’Connor wrote two novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960), and two story collections, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1964). Her Complete Stories, published posthumously in 1972, won the National Book Award that year, and in a 2009 online poll it was voted as the best book to have won the award in the contest’s 60-year history. Her essays were published in Mystery and Manners (1969) and her letters in The Habit of Being (1979). In 1988 the Library of America published her Collected Works; she was the first postwar writer to be so honored. O’Connor was educated at the Georgia State College for Women, studied writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and wrote much of Wise Blood at the Yaddo artists’ colony in upstate New York. She lived most of her adult life on her family’s ancestral farm, Andalusia, outside Milledgeville, Georgia.

Robert Fitzgerald's versions of the Iliad, the Aeneid, and the Oedipus cycle of Sophocles (with Dudley Fitts) are also classics. At his death, in 1985, he was Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard.

Print length

320 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date

January 1, 1965
Dimensions

5.4 x 0.85 x 8.25 inches
ISBN-10

0374504644
ISBN-13

978-0374504649
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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition (January 1, 1965)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0374504644
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0374504649
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.4 x 0.85 x 8.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #80,777 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #730 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- #1,730 in Short Stories (Books)
- #5,688 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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4.5 400 ratings

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Flannery O'Connor

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Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1925, the only child of Catholic parents. In 1945 she enrolled at the Georgia State College for Women. After earning her degree she continued her studies on the University of Iowa's writing program, and her first published story, 'The Geranium', was written while she was still a student. Her writing is best-known for its explorations of religious themes and southern racial issues, and for combining the comic with the tragic. After university, she moved to New York where she continued to write. In 1952 she learned that she was dying of lupus, a disease which had afflicted her father. For the rest of her life, she and her mother lived on the family dairy farm, Andalusia, outside Millidgeville, Georgia. For pleasure she raised peacocks, pheasants, swans, geese, chickens and Muscovy ducks. She was a good amateur painter. She died in the summer of 1964.

Photo by Cmacauley [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

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"It was an ugly mystery."

Reviewed in the United States on October 29, 2016

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That line is from one of the nine stories in Flannery O'Connor's posthumous collection of short stories. It comes close to summarizing how for me O'Connor presents life -- as "an ugly mystery". Since she was a devout Roman Catholic, she herself probably did not view life to be either ugly or a total mystery. But I do not grasp her theology, so much of what I am left with is the ugliness and the mystery.

Still, her stories should be read -- for their power and for the distinctiveness of her voice. I came to O'Connor much too late in my reading career. I was staggered by her first collection of short stores, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find", when I read it about four years ago. EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE is almost as good. It contains one story ("The Lame Shall Enter First") that strikes me as rough, much like a first draft (O'Connor wrote most of the stories in the book in her last years, when suffering from the Lupus that would kill her). But five of the stories are top shelf, as fine in my opinion as the best of Alice Munro, or James Joyce, or John Updike.

The stories are set primarily in rural and small-town Georgia of the late 1950's and early 1960's. Most end with a twist and in apocalyptic fashion. Three themes dominate. One is the theological. The first three stories seem Old Testament in nature, while the latter six partake of the New Testament, especially the Holy Ghost. (I can see preachers using many of these stories as texts for what could be enthralling sermons.) Another theme has to do with what I will call domestic relations, particularly those between an older parent and an adult child. For the last twelve years of her life, O'Connor lived with her widowed mother, who supposedly provided O'Connor a supportive and tranquil environment as she struggled with Lupus. However, the strained and bitterly antagonistic parent-child relationships of many of these stories make me wonder whether O'Connor's last years with her mother were truly all that peaceful for her. The third theme has to do with the relationship between blacks and whites in what was then still very much Jim Crow Georgia. These stories are not P.C. (indeed, O'Connor would have mocked, trenchantly, the very notion of P.C.), and if you are offended by the "n-word" regardless of context (much like Mark Twain and "Huckleberry Finn") you will be offended repeatedly. But as several of the stories indicate, and as one character says when he proposes to drink from the same glass as one of his mother's Negro workers, "the world is changing."

The book's title, by the way, is also the title of the first, and probably best, story. Towards the end of her life, O'Connor read a lot by the French philosopher and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In a piece called the "Omega Point", Teilhard wrote: "Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge."

35 people found this helpful

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P. J. Keating

A great Southern Catholic writer

Reviewed in the United States on July 13, 2015

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I always think that after an author dies, and the work doesn't die with them, my opinion of the work is irrelevant. But, for the record, Flannery O'Connor was one of the best "Southern Gothic" writers. She was Catholic and deeply religious and seems to have imagined that her fiction was an exemplary presentation of Catholic dogma. I was raised a Catholic but dropped religion, all religion, like a rock as soon as I left home for the Air Force in 1962. I look in her work in vain for anything that resembles the Catholicism that the nuns tried to drum into me. O'Connor seems to have a good feel for just how close normal southern life is to violence. Sudden explosions of violence are common in her work, as is love, often expressed bizarrely, and what looks to me like irrational behavior. Her people live in a magical world and their being God-drunk doesn't help them reach a peaceful place where kindness might be discovered.

18 people found this helpful

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M. Pickering

Violent, Dark, Funny.... GREAT!

Reviewed in the United States on April 10, 2003

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There seems to be a theme in most of the stories in Everything That Rises Must Converge, and that is sudden violence... usually at the end. I'm not giving anything away, because the read is the important part. O'Connor creates very authentic southern characters, that are funny, disgusting, bigoted, warm and all around human. There seems to be a slight O'Henry in O'Connor in that she likes to surprise you... some may say suddenly end things, quite dramatically. But it is with this ease that her writing is that much more disturbing. On the surface, the south she portrays is gentle and simple. Yet with sudden ferocity, she turns it on its head. To read O'Connor is really enthralling. The intensity and description in which she writes makes each story in this collection seem like a novel. I read Wise Blood a few years ago and liked it, but I will have to read it again as well as her other works after the great fulfillment this collection gave me.

12 people found this helpful

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NB De Atkine

The South as I knew it

Reviewed in the United States on May 10, 2021

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An amazing woman and writer. Her stories are gripping and so true of the south i grew up in. Such a genteel lady to write such hard edged stories but she captures the atmosphere and speech of the south. One of the really good American writers.

4 people found this helpful

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convergingnow

Audiobook Review TEN star book. Shameful audio

Reviewed in the United States on November 25, 2010

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I cannot give this book anything less than five stars....If my review would show up ONLY for the audiobook, I'd give it two stars. I haven't finished listening to it, but already during two stories there are missing chunks and bits of audio from one story in the middle of another.

This is shameful. I was over the moon to find out Flannery O'Connor's books are being released on audio, but Blackstone audio did a very sloppy job on this one.

And I would have chosen different readers. There's nothing worse than a fake Southen accent. Few actors who aren't from the South can pull it off, and even some who are FROM the South can't!

Blackstone, please fix this! Everything That Rises Must Converge

6 people found this helpful

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Andre Vlok

Expected more

Reviewed in the United States on January 4, 2017

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I've read two of O'Conner's novels, with this being my first short story collection of hers. The stories are mostly interesting, they drag you in and do what short fiction should do ... but I was still not quite impressed. The stories (at least in this collection) generally did not age well and are at times anachronistic without any significant moral or interest spanning the decades.

Worth the read, but only if you're caught on a train with nothing else to read ;)

One person found this helpful

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Everyman in prose

Reviewed in the United States on June 30, 2015

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Who doesn't love Flannery O'Connor? My great aunt is buried a few graves away from hers in Milledgeville, Georgia and on the last trip I took there to visit my relative, I was touched to see a rosary draped across Ms. O'Connor's stone. Such is the enduring power of her prose.

Often uncomfortable and disconcerting, Everything That Rises Must Converge offers glimpses into the darker aspects of ordinary folks. The grotesque, the hypocrisy, and the venal are described with clear eyed and beautiful language.

Such a poet, was our Ms. O'Connor, and what a treasure is this collection.

6 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Philip Classen, Ph.D., C. Psych & RMFT

White superiority and fragile tragic souls

Reviewed in Canada on June 6, 2020

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Fiction may we’ll be the most powerful way that humans learn and grow... And Flannery O’Connor, in her gift at creating characters, is a brilliant teacher. The weakness and desperation of white supremacy is powerfully revealed in the saturated wisdom of this extraordinary short story