Books

(New York): Signet / New American Library, 1953. First printing. Very good plus.. Very scarce signed first paperback edition, review copy, of O'Connor's acclaimed first novel. "All comic novels that are any good," O'Connor wrote in a later preface, "must be about matters of life and death." WISE BLOOD's comedy and cruelty provoke mirth without ease: afflicting the comfortable, certainly; comforting the afflicted, perhaps. Discomfited Rinehart editor John Selby dared to offer O'Connor an editorial letter with suggested revisions to an early draft, which exasperated O'Connor into a flat refusal to compromise — "Whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention [...] I am not writing a conventional novel" — and eventually drove the "stiff-necked, uncooperative and unethical" (Selby) author to a much more congenial partnership with Robert Giroux of Harcourt, Brace & Co., which published the first edition. The Signet paperback…

Wise Blood is Flannery O'Connor's first novel, originally published in 1952, exploring themes of redemption and spirituality through a young man's journey in the American South.