SOURCE: "Everything That Rises Must Converge," in Flannery O'Connor, Southern Illinois University Press, 1974, pp. 99-130.

In the following essay, Browning asserts that in O'Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge, "she recognized that the recovery of depth, or being, was possible only by stripping the masks from men whose fraudulent righteousness had rendered them too complacent even to be damned."

In Flannery O'Connor's posthumous volume of stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge, subject and setting are very much a part of the contemporary South. Economic growth is under way, and its partisans are feverishly engaged as midwives to "progress" ("A View of the Woods"); racial integration is a fact increasingly difficult to ignore, and white Southerners of all classes are forced to assume some attitude toward it ("Everything That Rises Must Converge"). The upheavals wrought by World War II and the Korean conflict have unsettled class lines, and the...