Flannery Oconnor

The Complete Stories gathers all 31 of Flannery O'Connor's short stories, spanning her entire career. The collection ranges across rural and urban Southern settings as well as New York City, returning to characters whose complacency, pride, or self-deception is shattered by sudden violence or unwanted revelation.

The collection opens with O'Connor's earliest stories. "The Geranium" follows Old Dudley, an elderly white Southerner in his daughter's cramped New York apartment, who fixates on a geranium in a neighbor's window as his only connection to home. When a well-dressed Black man moves next door and helps him up the stairs, the encounter humiliates Dudley to tears. The geranium falls and smashes in the alley, and Dudley cannot bring himself to retrieve it. "The Barber" centers on Rayber, a liberal college teacher who tries to defend his progressive views against his barber but loses his temper, punches the man, and flees half-lathered. "Wildcat" follows a blind old man named Gabriel through a terrifying night as a wildcat kills livestock nearby. "The Crop" satirizes Miss Willerton, an aspiring writer who fantasizes elaborate stories but cannot get past a single typed sentence. "The Turkey" traces 11-year-old Ruller's chase of a wounded wild turkey, his brief sense of divine favor when he finds it dead, and his devastation when older boys snatch it away. "The Train" introduces Hazel Motes, called Haze, riding a train toward Taulkinham, haunted by memories of his dead mother. Other early stories follow Haze and Enoch Emery, a lonely young man, through Taulkinham, where they encounter street preachers, a shrunken mummified figure in a museum, and a prostitute. In "Enoch and the Gorilla," Enoch steals a gorilla costume and wanders the woods in it, frightening away the first people he approaches.

"A Good Man Is Hard to Find" follows a grandmother who manipulates her son Bailey's family into a detour during their Florida vacation. She leads them down a dirt road, then realizes the plantation she remembers is in Tennessee, not Georgia. Her startled reaction causes the car to flip, and an escaped convict called The Misfit arrives with two armed companions. Bailey and his son John Wesley are taken into the woods and shot; the mother, the daughter, and the baby are taken next. The Misfit engages the grandmother in a conversation about Jesus and punishment. In a final moment, she reaches out and touches him, calling him one of her children. He recoils and shoots her three times.

"The Life You Save May Be Your Own" follows Mr. Shiftlet, a one-armed drifter who ingratiates himself with old Mrs. Crater to gain access to her automobile, marries her deaf-mute daughter Lucynell, then abandons the sleeping girl at a roadside diner. In "The River," Harry Ashfield, a neglected four- or five-year-old, is taken by his babysitter to a river baptism where a preacher tells him he now counts. The next morning, Harry returns alone to baptize himself and find the Kingdom of Christ, but the current pulls him under and carries him away.

"The Displaced Person" follows Mrs. McIntyre, a farm owner who hires Mr. Guizac, a Polish refugee arranged by a Catholic priest. Mrs. Shortley, the dairyman's wife, views the foreigners with suspicion and flees in the night, dying of a stroke. When Mrs. McIntyre discovers Mr. Guizac is arranging a marriage between his cousin in a displaced persons camp and one of her Black workers, she resolves to fire him but procrastinates. One morning, as Mr. Guizac lies beneath a tractor making a repair, a nearby tractor's brake slips. Mrs. McIntyre, the returned Mr. Shortley, and the Black worker Sulk all see it rolling toward him, and none calls out a warning. The tractor breaks his backbone.

"Good Country People" follows Joy Hopewell, a 32-year-old with a Ph.D. in philosophy and an artificial leg, who has changed her name to Hulga. She agrees to a picnic with Manley Pointer, a seemingly simple Bible salesman, planning to seduce him. In a barn loft, he persuades her to remove her artificial leg, then reveals his hollow Bible contains whiskey, obscene cards, and condoms. He steals the leg and disappears, telling her he has "been believing in nothing ever since I was born" (291).

"Greenleaf" centers on Mrs. May, a widowed farm owner tormented by a stray bull. When she forces her reluctant hired man to shoot it, the bull charges her instead, burying a horn in her heart. "A View of the Woods" follows 79-year-old Mark Fortune and his nine-year-old granddaughter Mary Fortune Pitts, who share a fierce stubbornness. When Fortune sells the lot in front of their house for a gas station against her wishes, they fight. He kills her by slamming her head against a rock and then suffers a fatal heart attack.

"Everything That Rises Must Converge" follows Julian, who accompanies his aging mother on the bus to her weekly reducing class. She wears a garish hat and clings to old Southern gentility. When a large Black woman boards wearing the identical hat and Julian's mother offers the woman's small son a penny, the woman strikes her with a heavy pocketbook. Julian lectures his fallen mother, but she calls for her childhood nurse and collapses. Julian runs for help, entering "the world of guilt and sorrow" (420).

"The Lame Shall Enter First" follows Sheppard, a widowed city recreational director who neglects his grieving 10-year-old son Norton to rehabilitate Rufus Johnson, a brilliant delinquent with a clubfoot. Johnson tells Norton his dead mother is in heaven, and the boy becomes obsessed with finding her through a telescope. Johnson insists Satan has Sheppard in his power and that only Jesus saves. After Johnson is arrested, Sheppard realizes he has ignored his own child and rushes to find Norton, only to discover the boy has hanged himself in the attic.

"Revelation" takes place largely in a doctor's waiting room, where the self-satisfied Mrs. Turpin ranks social classes in her mind. A college girl named Mary Grace hurls a textbook at her face and whispers, "Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog" (500). That evening at her hog pen, Mrs. Turpin demands of God how she can be both a hog and herself. She receives a vision of souls marching to heaven: Outcasts surge joyfully ahead while respectable people like herself bring up the rear, their virtues burning away.

"Parker's Back" follows O. E. Parker, a man covered in tattoos. After crashing a tractor into a tree, Parker has a stern Byzantine Christ with "all-demanding eyes" (522) tattooed on his back. His fundamentalist wife, Sarah Ruth Cates, calls it idolatry and beats him with a broom until welts form on the tattooed face.

The final story, "Judgement Day," is a revised version of "The Geranium," completing a circle across O'Connor's career. Tanner, an elderly Georgian stranded in his daughter's New York apartment, plans to escape to Corinth, Georgia, dead or alive, with a note pinned in his coat directing that his body be shipped to Coleman Parrum, his Black companion. When Tanner calls a Black neighbor "Preacher," the man, an actor, is enraged and attacks him, triggering a stroke. Tanner attempts to crawl down the stairs but falls headlong and dies. His daughter buries him in New York but, unable to sleep, eventually has his body shipped to Corinth.