Flannery O'Connor 's life is best summarized in Robert Fitzgerald's introduction to Everything That Rises Must Converge . As friend and literary executor, Fitzgerald writes of her with candor and love: "She was a girl who started with a gift for cartooning and satire, and found in herself a far greater gift, unique in her time and place, a marvel." That gift, of course, was storytelling. She wrote two novels and thirty-one short stories and the critical response to her work has been extraordinary. Since her death in 1964, eleven books of criticism have been published, as well as two collections of essays and a major bibliographical study. In little more than two decades since her reputation began to develop in the mid-1950s, no fewer than three hundred critical essays have appeared in journals.

One of the principal reasons for this overwhelming response to her fiction is undoubtedly the...