Bookends: Oct. 3, 1988

FLANNERY O'CONNOR: COLLECTED WORKS

edited by Sally Fitzgerald

Library of America; 1,281 pages; $30

"I believe that there are many rough beasts now slouching toward Bethlehem to be born and that I have reported the progress of a few of them." Flannery O'Connor's modest self-analysis remains the most penetrating of all. Doomed by | a hereditary disease, lonely, indomitable, sustained by her faith and her work, the Southern Catholic saw herself as a lifelong outsider. When she died at 39 in 1964, she left a legacy of gothic tales obsessively concerned with characters she called "more or less primitive." The author...

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