It is a measure of her greatness, perhaps, that although she would be only sixty-four years old if she were still among us, Flannery O’Connor—who passed away a quarter-century ago in her native Georgia, at the age of thirty-nine—seems already to belong to the ages. Typically, an author’s literary reputation declines precipitously once he is no longer around to keep it going, but O’Connor’s reputation has grown steadily in the years since her death; her two extremely impressive (if ultimately unsuccessful) novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960), have continued to earn the respect and interest of intelligent readers, and—far more important—a number of her three dozen or so short stories, the majority of which appeared originally in either A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) or Everything That Rises Must Converge(1965), have deservedly attained the status of classics in the genre. Indeed, though her position as a novelist is highly arguable, it seems eminently fair to say that the career of Flannery O’Connor, like the careers of Hawthorne, Poe, Stephen Crane, and Henry James before her, constitutes a major chapter in the history of the American short story. How appropriate, then, that the publishers of the splendid Library of America series, whose list of collected works already includes all or part of the oeuvres of the aforementioned nineteenth-century masters, have seen fit to add the name of Flannery O’Connor to that distinguished roster—a selection which makes her, whether by design or happenstance,