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...