These stories were published by Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, in the spring of 1965. By this time, O’ Connor had already died of Lupus, on August 3rd, 1964. She had been diagnosed with this disease of the auto-immune system early in 1951, at the age of twenty-five. Her illness brought her back to the South, (from her previous residences in New York and Connecticut), where she lived until her death. For the following thirteen years, O’ Connor lived with her mother at the Cline Family house in Milledgeville.
While there, she wrote this seventh collection of stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge. She wrote it while working for about three hours a day. This was about all the time she could physically handle working, since the disease from which she suffered robbed her of energy, causing her to fatigue (to easily tire). It also limited her movements, as Lupus also causes stiffening and pain in the joints.

In understanding her story, it is essential to understand the two components that make O’ Connor’s story what it is. Flannery O’ Connor was a lady of the South and a Roman Catholic, which directly flows over into the whole of her work. The convergence of these two factors aided her in becoming the great writer that she was. In the article "Southern Writers are Stuck with The South," Miss O’ Connor says, "as unique as the presence of two races is the fact that the South is a real Bible Belt.  We have a sense of the absolute .. a sense of Moses’ face as be pulverized the idols." Later, she goes on to say, "I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. For me, the meaning of life is centered in our redemption by Christ, and what I see by the light of their Christian faith will have, in their times. - the sharpest eyes for the grotesque, for the perverse, for the unacceptable. The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problems will be to make them appear as distortions to an audience which is seeing them as natural" (Atlanta Magazine, 1963).

In praising Marion Montgomery’s The Wandering of Desire, Miss O’ Connor said that any southern writer has two great disadvantages - a knowledge  of the Bible, and a sense of history. Certainly in Milledgeville, the visitors, even a visitor with roots in New England, is impressed by the feeling people have for the continuity of experience (Hicks, 1962).

As for the Bible, Miss O’ Connor asserts that it is still a great power in the South and that it continues to influence the Southern writers. For one thing, it conditions him to think in concrete terms, "we don’t discuss problems, we tell stories." More important, the Bible gives meaning and dignity to the lives of the poor people of the South, and the writer, particularly the Christian writer has something in common with them (Hicks, 83).

The comment on this point naturally led me to ask Miss O’ Connor why she, a Catholic, has written about Fundamentalist Protestants in both her novels, Wise Blood, The Violent Bear It Away, and many short stories. Her answer is quiet but emphatic. "I’m not interested in the sects as sects; I’m concerned with the religious individual, the backwards prophets. Old Farwater is the hero of The Violent Bear It Away, and I’m right behind him 100 per cent." Since there are not many Catholics in Miss O’ Connor’s part of Georgia, she has to write about Protestants, and she finds such characters as Old Farwater completely congenial.

I ask her about her relationship with Milledgeville: doesn’t she feel alienated both as a writer and as a Catholic. She doesn’t think so. People accept her as a person, and that is all that matters. As a Catholic of course, she is a member of a minority group, but it is a group that has long been recognized by the community.

Devoutly Catholic, Flannery infuses her work with a sense of mystery, an extra dimension that gives her fiction duality of timelessness. Her faith furnishes her with "a sense of continuity from the time of Christ."  She says: "I can accept the universe as it is - I don’t have to makeup my own sense of values; I can apply to a judgment higher than my own.

Flannery spent her last years at her family Andalusia farmhouse writing the stories that formed her second collection, Everything That Rises Must Converge (Balee, 98). O’ Connor had come more and more to see her illness as a blessing that augmented her writing. Flannery certainly had her share of the dubious "blessing," which she accepted but also joked about. Her sense of irony never left her, and it is present in all of her last stories. Of this story, which later won first prize in the O. Henry awards, O’ Connor told Maryat Lee understatedly, it "touches on a certain topical issue in these parts and takes place on a bus." That topical issue - integration of the races - had finally been met head-on in Georgia. O’ Connor noted that "most local restaurants... integrated peacefully, and that the local college had accepted two black students and was expecting more."

As Robert Fitzgerald explained, Flannery used the title Everything That Rises Must Converge with both "full respect and... profound and necessary irony ...Rising and Convergence in these stories are shown in classes, generations and colors. The title story of the collection treats the convergence of all three of these groups. All good stories are about convergence (Balee, 48).

A paragraph of Julian’s intense monologue characterize not only Mrs. Chestny, but also the jaded young man himself, who despises his mother for her unreal expectations and blames her for a social situation in which she must sacrifice herself for his welfare (page 737).

Flannery O’ Connor is a satirist in the savagely indignant tradition of juvenal and swift. Like most satirists, she is a conservative, writing in an apparently radical idiom. Miss O’ Connor’s work was strongly a social commentary with relevance to the Civil Rights Movement of her generation. She looked at the world she lived in just as it was and simply wrote stories that were a reflection of what she saw. In everything, O’ Connor reveals some of the South’s true colors.

Like many Southerners, Flannery realized that race relations in the South were changing although still disadvantageous to blacks, and she explored the ramifications of those shifts in several of her stories (Balee, 48), such as she did in Everything That Rises Must Converge. Here, for example, she examined the social discomfort the newly (somewhat) legally liberated Negro brought upon whites of this region of the South.

In early 1961, Flannery wrote a friend that she had "been rigorously celebrating secession here - parade, pageant, pilgrimages, etc." At the same time, however, she continued to have highly personal and cordial relationships with the black workers at Andalusia - Jack, shot, and Louis, and with other blacks in the community (Balee, 100).

To another correspondent she wrote, "the radical right wing exists in the South. I have just been to Texas and Southern Louisiana, and I witnessed some radical conservation and some radical liberation too."
 

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. 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 (Coffey, 93-94).

This tragi-comic tale of social bigotry and fake liberal sentiment is the title of Flannery’s last collection of short stories, written before her untimely death at age thirty-nine. "It displays the author’s unique taste for ironic social commentary and grim humor (Masterplot II, 736).

O’ Connor’s stories are sometimes like Elizabethan secondary plots that provide comic relief for tragedy. The lowlife reenacts in miniature the sins of the tragic hero...(737).

Besides the creation of unusual symbols, such as the grotesque hat with one purple flap up and the other down, suggesting the social direction of the wearers, O’ Connor is a master of dramatic irony.

Like the satirist of old, Miss O’ Connor is an idealist, using her tragi-comic situation and epigrammatic language as any astringent comic corrective (Nancy, and Hoffman, in Studies In Short Fiction, Summers 1973, 294-295).

The stories of her last years, published for the most part in Everything That Rises Must Converge indicate that a shift in interest was already under way. Though she holds on to religious theme, the nightmarish world of the early work gives  way to something closer to the realities of home.

The theme that runs most persistently through her last work is that the liberal  mind, convinced of its own rationality and self-righteousness, cannot possibly comprehend the depths of human nature ...The early work is only stylized Southern because her first intention was to communicate certain truths which have nothing to do with geography. She continued to pursue a religious end, but as mind and art matured, she gave up the flights of allegory and settled on the surface of life, as if there were a special grace that she had overlooked. "The image of the South is so strong in us that it is a force which has to be encountered and engaged, and it is when this is true engagement that its meaning will lead outward to universal human interest" (Howell, 369).

Of writers of her region of the Southern U. S., O’ Connor says, "The Georgia writer's true country is not Georgia, but Georgia is an entrance to it for him. One uses the region in order to suggest what transcends it." "Southern writers are stuck with the South," she says, "and it’s a good thing to be stuck with." Later, she states, "Southern history has reinforced what the fiction writer, who is any good, always has to show the world... that the human situation is a good deal more complex and cross-purposed than ideals and abstractions allows for. This is not unique, it’s a function of art, but the South knows it better than the rest of the country" (Conversation with O’ Connor).