SOURCE: "Introduction," in Everything That Rises Must Converge, by Flannery O'Connor, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1956, pp. vii-xxxiv.

In the following introduction, Fitzgerald provides an overview of O'Connor's career and the themes present in the stories in Everything That Rises Must Converge.

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. She kept going deeper (this is a phrase she used) until making up stories becam, for her, a way of testing and defining and conveying that superior knowledge that must be called religious. It must be called religious but with no false note in our voices, because her writing will make any false note that is applied to it very clear indeed. Bearing hard upon motives and manners, her stories as moralities cut in every direction and sometimes...