Everything That Rises Must Converge

Mary Flannery O’Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, on March 25, 1925. She was the only child in an Irish-Catholic family and remained devoutly religious throughout her life. O’Connor graduated from the Georgia State College for Women in 1945 and was accepted to the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In Iowa, she often felt out of place; most of her classmates were men, and she was teased for her thick Southern accent. Her professors, however, recognized her potential, and O’Connor graduated with her MFA in writing in 1947. She moved to New York, where she worked on her first novel. However, O’Connor’s health was failing, and in 1950, at just 25 years old, she was diagnosed with lupus, an autoimmune disease that had killed her father. The diagnosis forced O’Connor to return to the family dairy farm to live with her mother, where she would spend the rest of her life. Isolated on the farm, O’Connor dedicated herself to writing, and her first novel, Wise Blood, was published in 1952. Neither Wise Blood nor O’Connor’s second novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1964), was celebrated by critics. However, her short fiction, particularly the story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (1955), established her as a great American writer.

O’Connor’s writing is heavily influenced by Southern culture, her Catholic faith, and her experiences with illness. Redemption, salvation, and moral ambiguity are common in O’Connor’s work, and these religious themes often appear alongside grotesque or unsettling imagery, a trademark of Southern Gothic literature. Most of O’Connor’s work is classified as Southern Gothic, a literary genre that uses grotesque, macabre, and even supernatural elements to highlight the complexities of Southern society, including the legacies of slavery, racism, classism, and poverty. O’Connor is particularly known for her depictions of the body as “ugly” or with physical disabilities, perhaps a fascination that developed from her experience with lupus and the distortion she witnessed in her own body.

O’Connor lived with lupus for 12 years after her diagnosis, much longer than initially anticipated. She passed away on August 3, 1964, at 39 years old. The story collection Everything That Rises Must Converge was published after her death in 1965. The Complete Stories was also published posthumously in 1971, which united all of O’Connor’s work including a few stories unpublished. It won the 1972 National Book Award for Fiction.

“Everything That Rises Must Converge” isn’t necessarily the most typical example of O’Connor’s work since it lacks overtly religious subject matter and obvious Southern Gothic styling. However, qualities common in her writing still make appearances. There are, for example, numerous grotesque descriptions throughout the text, such as houses that look like “bulbous liver-colored monstrosities of a uniform ugliness” (184) and the mother’s “fiercely distorted” (196) face when she collapses at the end of the story. “Everything That Rises Must Converge” also remains firmly rooted in O’Connor’s Catholic faith with themes like morality and redemption. Most important to the context of the story is the setting of the Southern United States. O’Connor writes about the issues affecting the region during her lifetime, in this case, integration and the civil rights movement. The influence of her life in the South is seen in the subject matter of “Everything That Rises Must Converge” and in the characters’ speech patterns.