Books

Hardcover. 8vo. Published by Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1952. 232 pgs. First Edition/First Printing. Price-clipped DJ has shelf-wear present to the DJ extremities (DJ is chipped with pieces missing to the top edge of the front panel and a smaller chip present to the rear DJ panel) . Bound in cloth boards with titles present to the spine and front board. Boards have light shelf-wear present to the extremities. No ownership marks present. Text is clean and free of marks. Binding tight and solid. Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor's astonishing and haunting first novel, is a classic of twentieth-century literature. It is the story of Hazel Motes, a twenty-two-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his inborn, desperate fate. He falls under the spell of a "blind" street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate fifteen-year-old daughter, Sabbath Lily. In an ironic, malicious gesture of his own non-faith, and to prove himself a greater cynic than Hawks, Motes founds the Church Without Christ, but is still thwarted in his efforts to lose God. He meets Enoch Emery, a young man with "wise blood," who leads him to a mummified holy child and whose crazy maneuvers are a manifestation of Motes's existential struggles. EB; 8vo 8" - 9" tall; 232 pages.

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.