Franklin Library leather edition of Flannery O'Connor's "The Complete Stories," a Limited edition, Illustrated by Ben F. Stahl, Frontispiece portrait of O'Connor by Jill Bossert, one of the COLLECTED STORIES OF THE WORLD'S GREATEST WRITERS series, published in 1980. Bound in brown leather, the book has moire silk end leaves, acid-free paper, Symth-sewn binding, a satin book marker, gold gilding on three edges---in near FINE condition. Mary Flannery O'Connor, who lived from 1925 – 1964, was an American writer and essayist who wrote two novels and 32 short stories. O'Connor was born in SAVANNAH, Georgia, but her when she was five years old her family moved to Milledgeville where she attended Georgia State College for Women. She later received an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Iowa. She lived at Yaddo, the writer's colony in Saratoga Springs where she worked on "Wise Blood. Later she lived in New York City but when she contracted Lupus, she returned to live with her mother in Milledgeville, where her mother operated a dairy. She wrote in a Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters: one-legged Bible salesman in "Good Country People;" surly, mean-spirited educated girls, like Mary Grace in "Revelation" or mean ex-prisoners like 'the Misfit" in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." Her writing also reflected her own Roman Catholic faith, and frequently examined questions of morality and ethics. She wrote ironic, subtly allegorical fiction about deceptively backward Southern characters, usually fundamentalist Protestants, who undergo transformations of character that to her thinking brought them closer to the Catholic mind. The transformation is often accomplished through pain, violence, and ludicrous behavior in the pursuit of the holy. However grotesque the setting, she tried to portray her characters as they might be touched by divine grace. In Milledgeville at her mother's farm, known as Andalusia, she raised and nurtured some 100 peafowl.  Despite her sheltered life, her writing reveals an uncanny grasp of the nuances of human behavior. She was a devout Catholic living in the "Bible Belt," the Protestant South. She never married, relying for companionship on her correspondence and close relationship with her mother. This volume has all of her famous short works: "A Good Man Is Hard to Find,"  "The Geranium," "Wildcat," "The Crop," "The Turkey," "The Peeler," "The Barber," "Wildcat," "The Crop," "The Lame Shall Enter First," "Parker's Back," "Enoch and the Gorilla," "A Temple of the Holy Spirit," "A Circle of Fire," "The Heart of the Park," "A Streak of Good Fortune," "A Temple of the Holy Spirit," "Judgement Day," "Revelation," "The Life You Save May Be Your Own," "The Heart of the Park," "The Turkey," "The River," "Why Do the Heathen Rage?," "The Artificial Nigger," "You Can't Be Any Poorer Than the Dead," "The River," "The Comforts of Home," "A Circle of Fire," "The Displaced Person," "Everything That Rises Must Converge,"  "A View of the Woods," "The Partridge Festival,"  "Greenleaf," "The Train"---all of her short works.  O'Connor's Complete Stories won the 1972 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and was named the "Best of the National Book Awards" by Internet visitors in 2009. 648 pages. I offer Combined shipping.