A Good Man Is Hard to Find: Flannery O'Connor

by Flannery O'Connor

Book Overview

"A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is Flannery O'Connor's most famous and most discussed story. O'Connor herself singled it out by making it the title piece of her first collection and the story she most often chose for readings or talks to students. It is an unforgettable tale, both riveting and comic, of the confrontation of a family with violence and sudden death. More than anything else O'Connor ever wrote, this story mixes the comedy, violence,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0813519772
• ISBN13: 9780813519777
• Release Date: July 1993
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Length: 190 Pages
• Weight: 2.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Careful analysis of a great story !

Designed as a casebook "for both beginning and advanced students," the editor, Frederick Asals, of the University of Toronto, provides an authoritative text of Flannery O'Connor's short story, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," a twenty-two page Introduction and a chronology of O'Connor's life and work. Also, includes two items by O'Connor (introductory remarks at a reading of the story and excerpts from two letters), reprints of ten critical essays, and a select bibliography. Asals remarks in Part I of his three-part Introduction that "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is probably O'Connor's best-known work. Describes the story as one which "makes available more rapidly and obviously than anything else she ever wrote [the] unsettling mix of comedy, violence, and religious concern that characterizes her fiction." Details the story's publication history and discusses its place within the context of the 1950s and "Southern nostalgia." In Part II of his Introduction, Asals discusses at length -- and offers specific examples of -- the criticism and analysis the story has undergone since its publication in Caroline Gordon and Allen Tate's anthology, "The House of Fiction." In Part III, Asals offers insights into the story's meaning. Discusses the design of the story's action (to close the gap between the grandmother and The Misfit) and offers a view of The Misfit as "a variation on that enduring American type, the individualistic male whose violence both expresses and substitutes for inner incompleteness." Comments on the grandmother's various roles, including her adoption at the end of the story of that of assuming an "archetypal female role." Discusses the impact and overall importance of this story within the context of American literature. The ten critical essays reprinted and included in the volume are: Bellamy, Michael O. "Everything Off Balance: Protestant Election in Flannery O'Connor's 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find,'" Rpt. from The Flannery O'Connor Bulletin (1979): 116-24. Bryant, Hallman B. "Reading the Map in 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find,'" Rpt. from Studies in Short Fiction 18 (1981): 301-07. Doxey, William S. "A Dissenting Opinion of Flannery O'Connor's 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find,'" Rpt. from Studies in Short Fiction 10 (1973): 199-204. Dyson, Peter. "Cats, Crime, and Punishment: The Mikado's Pitti-Sing in 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find," Rpt. from English Studies in Canada 14 (1988): 436-52. Jones, Madison. "A Good Man's Predicament," Rpt. from The Southern Review 20 (1984): 836-41. Marks, W.S., III. "Advertisements for Grace: Flannery O'Connor's 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find,'" Rpt. from Studies in Short Fiction 4 (1966): 19-27. Martin, Carter. "'The Meanest of Them Sparkled': Beauty and Landscape in Flannery O'Connor's Fiction," Rpt. from Realist of Distances: Flannery O'Connor Revisited. Ed. Karl-Heinz Westarp and Jan Nordby Gretlund (Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus UP, 1987): 147-59. Scheick, William J. "Flannery O'Connor's 'A Good Man Is

WOW! What a great story...don't read the other review!

Don't read that other review...it will ruin the whole point of the book. Without giving anything away, I will just say that this is an amazing book, and it stirred several emotions....and I can't say more without giving it away....so I will just recommend you read it! Well written, great, great book! Takes no time to read!

Oddball prophets caught in the web they wove themselves.

They are misfits, wanderers, and souls searching for faith and absolution. Many of them are, to one extent or another, hypocrites; others are almost unbelievably naive. All of them are Southerners -- and yet, even the most outlandish among Flannery O'Connor's protagonists come across as entirely believable, complex characters whom, regardless of location, you might expect to come across in your own travels, too; and there is no telling how such an encounter would turn out. Of course, you would hope it does not prove quite as disastrous as the title story's chance meeting of a family taking a wrong turn (on the road as much as figuratively) and the self-proclaimed Misfit haunting that particular area of Georgia; which culminates in a bizarre conversation, the failure of communication underneath which only adds to the reader's growing feeling of helplessness in view of impending doom. And such a sense of irreversible destiny pervades many a story in this collection; yet, while as in O'Connor's writing in general, her and her protagonists' Catholic faith plays a dominant role in the course of the events, that course is not so much brought about by the hand of God as by the characters' own acts, decisions, judgments and prejudices. Freakish as they are, O'Connor's (anti-)heroes are meant to be prophets, messengers of a long forgotten responsibility, as she explained in her 1963 essay "The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South:" their prophecy is "a matter of seeing near things with their extensions of meaning and thus of seeing far things close up." Often, she uses names, titles and items of every day life and imbues them with a new meaning in the context of her stories; this collection's title story, for example, is named for a blues song popularized by Bessie Smith in the late 1920s, and a cautionary road sign commonly seen in the 1950s ("The Life You Save May Be Your Own") becomes the title and motto of a story about a wanderer's encounter with a mother and her handicapped daughter who take him in, only to use that purported charity to their own advantage -- at the end of which, predictably, nobody is the better off. Indeed, the endings of O'Connor's stories are as far from your standard happy ending as you can imagine; and while you cannot help but develop, early on, a premonition of doom, most of the time the precise nature of that doom is anything but predictable. "A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories" was Flannery O'Connor's first published collection of short stories; yet, by the time these stories appeared (nine of the ten were published in various magazines between 1953 and 1955 before their inclusion in this 1955 collection) she was already an accomplished writer, with not only a novel under her belt ("Wise Blood," 1952) but also, and significantly, a master's thesis likewise consisting of a collection of short stories, entitled "The Geranium and Other Stories" (1947; first published as a collection in 1971's National Book A