We now have all the work by which Flannery O'Connor will be remembered in the world. Of her last stories, collected in Everything That Rises Must Converge, it is certainly the just praise, and maybe the highest after all, that they are up to her first ones. She wrote best in the short story and has left a handful of them at least that are likely to last as long as literacy. When she died at thirty-nine last year, it was with her work done, I think, and work of an imaginative order and brilliance rare in the world at most times, perhaps always in American writing…. [A Good Man Is Hard to Find and] Everything That Rises Must Converge,… contain some of the surest and most original comic writing ever done by an American.
Her novels are another matter. They suffer, I think, from an excessive violence of conception. They are the children of a rape or, better, of a five-months birth, on their way to being something perhaps very fine, but not there yet. Wise Blood … seems more the work of somebody who has a Master's degree in creative writing from the University of Iowa in pocket—as she had—than a book that has seen its way to saying something. Though the early train scenes have some wildly comic writing, the book as a whole seems as much a product of the determination to write a full-length novel as of anything more august. (pp. 93-4)
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