Flannery O'Connor was working onEverything That Rises Must Convergeat 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. Flannery O'Connorwas 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. Flannery O'Connor was working onEverything That Rises Must Convergeat 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. "Flannery O'Connor was never better. This is a fine collection."J. F. Powers "The current volume of posthumous storied is the work of a master, a writer's writerbut a reader's tooan incomparable craftsman who wrote, let it be said, some of the finest stories in our language."Newsweek "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 "There is very little contemporary fiction which touches the level of Flannery O'Connor at her best."Alan Pryce-Jones,New York Herald Tribune