Books: Of Ultimate Things

EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE by Flannery O'Connor. 268 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $4.95.

Mary Flannery O'Connor had the luck of the Irish, or seemed to. At 25 she was pretty, witty, and had published fiction in some of the best little magazines. At 26, she came down with an incurable form of lupus erythematosus, a correlative of arthritis that softened the bones in her legs and lower face, eventually reduced her to crutches and permanent debility. But Author O'Connor had the stubbornness of the Irish, too. During the next 13 years, passed...

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