Flannery O'Connor is one of the great American short story writers whose subjects are the duality of the Deep South and her Catholic faith. O'Connor once referred to A Good Man is Hard to Find as 'nine stories about original sin'. Combining a deft comic sensibility with the grotesque and tragic, they are stories in which characters lead lives of brutal poverty and fierce cruelty; where ordinary events can tip over into misfortune, violence and despair.
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Editorial Reviews
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'O'Connor has a light touch, which lands like iron, and a keen, curious and unflattering eye. She is ferocious and elegant' Guardian 'Once read, she cannot be forgotten' Financial Times
About the Author
Flannery O'Connor was born in Georgia, USA, in 1925 and died there thirty-nine years later. Her work includes another collection of stories, Everything that Rises Must Converge, and two short novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear it Away. In 1979 her collected letters were published under the title The Habit of Being.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Oddball prophets caught in the web they wove themselves.,
By Themis-Athena (from somewhere between California and Germany) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Good Man Is Hard to Find (A Women's Press Classic) (Paperback)
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 Award winning "The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor," although several of those stories had likewise been published individually before). Two of the stories included in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" count among O'Connor's six winners of the O'Henry Award for Short Fiction ("The Life You Save May Be Your Own" and "The Circle in the Fire," again an exploration of insincerity, half-hearted charity and its exploitation); and the collection as a whole, even more than her first novel, quickly established her as a masterful storyteller, endowed with vision, an unfailing sense for language and a supreme feeling for the use of irony; all of which have long since placed her firmly in the first tier of 20th century American authors. Flannery O'Connor died, at the age of 39, of lupus, an inflammatory disease which in less severe forms may not be more than an (albeit substantial) nuisance, but which proved fatal in her case as well as that of her father before her. Her literary career, almost the sole focus of her life from the moment that she was diagnosed onwards, was thus cut short way before her time. Yet, to this day her writing holds a unique position in contemporary literature; and "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is an excellent place to start exploring her work. Also recommended: Eudora Welty : Stories, Essays & Memoir (Library of America, 102) Eudora Welty : Complete Novels: The Robber Bridegroom, Delta Wedding, The Ponder Heart, Losing Battles, The Optimist's Daughter (Library of America) Flannery O'Connor : Collected Works : Wise Blood / A Good Man Is Hard to Find / The Violent Bear It Away / Everything that Rises Must Converge / Essays & Letters (Library of America) The Heart is a Lonely Hunter/Reflections in a Golden Eye/The Ballad of the Sad Cafe/The Member of the Wedding/The Clock Without Hands (Library of America) To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) To Kill a Mockingbird (Universal Legacy Series)
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Tough Issues About Tough People Addressed in Tough Time [61],
By Miami Bob "Resurgent Reading" (Miami, FL United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Good Man Is Hard to Find (A Women's Press Classic) (Paperback)
A candid warning must be delivered: this is not a book for the timid. These stories resonate with horror and violence.
The concepts of violence are the common thread. Thankfully, O'Connor spares us the detailing of the violent acts. The ruminations about the same are as far as the reader must go. In the first story - "A Good Man is Hard to Find" - innocent women and children are murdered without explanation or reason. The second and sixth stories - "The River" and "The Artificial Nigger" - delve with humiliation of the young and naive. The third and ninth stories - "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" and "Good Country People" - deal with mistrust and theft of the not-so-young and naive. And, then the losers of Darwinism are outlined in the fifth, eighth and tenth stories - "A Temple of the Holy Ghost", "A Late Encounter With The Enemy", and "The Displaced Person" - where adults are mistreated by societal norms. Harsh results for those who "did nothing to deserve it" are too common in these stories. Trickling with southern dialect - much like Faulkner, Morrison or many of the other 20th century southern greats - this book phonetically spells their spoken words so as to deliver the reader to the point where one can almost taste the collard greens and grits. After reading the first book, I ran to the internet to see who was first - "Deliverance" or this book as each depicts southern white men in a worst light - ignorant (maybe illiterate) murderers without reason who jump out of the woods with shotguns in hand. In "Deliverance", Dickey allowed good to prevail. O'Connor does quite the contrary. O'Connor's story precedes Dickey's novel by 15 years. To those who prefer romance novels and lighter reading, this is not the cluster of stories which I would recommend. These stories do not touch upon light reading which concern fun concepts. I like some harsh issues in literature. But, even these stories may have been more than I had bargained for. But, I love southern literature - so I am biased to decry how much I enjoyed these stories. And, even those who less adore southern culture or literature would have to acknowledge this author's literary skill or talent. If you have not the time for Faulkner in the immediate future, read a few of these stories. If you like them, you will probably enjoy Faulkner.
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