“AS CLOSE TO PERFECT AS WRITING GETS”: FIRST EDITION OF FLANNERY O’CONNOR’S FIRST SHORT STORY COLLECTION, SIGNED BY HER

O'CONNOR, Flannery. A Good Man is Hard to Find. New York: Harcourt, Brace (1955). Octavo, original black cloth, original dust jacket. $19,500.

First edition, first state, of O’Connor’s famed first collection of short stories, her second published book, in first-issue dust jacket, signed by her.

These ten stories—ranked by many readers as some of O'Connor's strongest work and consistently lauded as masterfully crafted classics of modern American short fiction—take place in a rural South "that somehow hovers outside of time, where both the New Deal and the New Testament feel like recent history. It's soaked in violence and humor, in sin and in God… a land haunted by Christ… [Many people] are in turn haunted by O'Connor. Her doctrinally strict, mordantly funny stories and novels are as close to perfect as writing gets" (New York Times). First-state book with "tyring" on page 125, in first-issue dust jacket with reviews for Wise Blood on rear panel. Bruccoli & Clark I:281. Farmer A.2.I.a.1.

Book with slight label residue to inscription page, top corners bumped; price-clipped dust jacket with mild wear, toning to spine, very shallow chipping to spine and corners, and one tape repair to verso. An extremely good signed copy.