During her lifetime, O’Connor wrote thirty-one short stories, and this website discusses twenty-five of them. The six excluded stories are “The Train,” “The Peeler,” “The Heart of the Park,” “A Stroke of Good Fortune,” “Enoch and the Gorilla,” and "You Can't Be Any Poorer Than Dead." These stories are excluded because they were eventually incorporated into O'Connor's novels, the first five stories being associated with O’Connor’s first novel, Wise Blood, and the sixth story being associated with her second novel, The Violent Bear It Away. Because the stories appear as either chapters in the drafts of her novels or chapters in the published versions of her novels, the stories would most appropriately be discussed in conjunction with the novels, which are not included in this website.
In 1948, during her winter at the Yaddo artists' retreat, O’Connor made great progress on what would become her first novel, Wise Blood. The book features protagonist Hazel Motes, who started as Haze Wickers in some of her earliest drafts, as well as Enoch Emery, Hazel’s friend who works as a guard at the City Forest Park Zoo. That winter, O'Connor had several chapters of the book presumably finished. Her short story “The Train” would be her first chapter, “The Peeler” would be the third chapter, “A Woman on the Stairs,” which was later renamed “A Stroke of Good Fortune” (as it appears in her 1955 collection of stories A Good Man Is Hard to Find) would be the fourth chapter, and “The Heart of the Park” would be the ninth chapter.
According to The Complete Stories, “The Train,” “The Peeler,” “The Heart of the Park,” and “Enoch and the Gorilla” were all revised or rewritten for use in the final version of Wise Blood, published in 1952. “A Stroke of Good Fortune,” named “A Woman on the Stairs” when O’Connor first wrote it, was part of the first drafts of her novel and told the story of Hazel Motes’s sister, Ruby Hill. Even though “A Stroke of Good Fortune” never became one of the chapters in the final published version of Wise Blood, it still relates to the characters and ideas in the four short stories that did become chapters in Wise Blood.
Toward the end of 1952 and into the beginning of 1953, after the publication of Wise Blood, O'Connor began working on her second novel, The Violent Bear It Away, specifically the story "You Can't Be Any Poorer Than Dead," which, biographer Brad Gooch notes, "begun as the first chapter of her new novel, the macabre slapstick of the teenage Francis Marion Tarwater" (225). In addition to its incorporation into the second novel, "You Can't Be Any Poorer Than Dead" was also published as a short story in the magazine New World Writing in October 1955.
Works Cited
Gooch, Brad. Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor. New York, Little, Brown, 2009.