"A Good Man Is Hard to Find" (Women Writers : Text and Contexts) (Paperback)

by Flannery O'Connor (Author), Frederick Asals (Editor) "The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida..." (more)
Key Phrases: thown everything, three times through the chest, other meanness, Flannery O'Connor, Pitty Sing, June Star (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Part of The Wadsworth Casebooks for Reading, Research, and Writing Series, this new title provides all the materials a student needs to complete a literary research assignment in one convenient location. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author
Laurie Kirszner and Stephen Mandell are nationally well-known authors. Having written bestsellers in nearly every English market, they have the deepest publishing record of any handbook author, and have successfully published up and down the curriculum from Developmental to Literature. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 180 pages
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press (September 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813519772
• ISBN-13: 978-0813519777
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #609,527 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Oddball prophets caught in the web they wove themselves., January 8, 2004

By	Themis-Athena (from somewhere between California and Germany) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

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)

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars WOW! What a great story...don't read the other review!, April 12, 2008

By	Melissa (Alabama) - See all my reviews

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!

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Careful analysis of a great story ! , July 16, 2008

By	R. Neil Scott "Author of Flannery O'Connor: A... (Murfreesboro, TN USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Designed as a casebook "for both beginning and advanced students," Asals 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 Hard to Find' and G.K. Chesterton's Manalive," Rpt. from Studies in American Fiction 11 (1983): 241-45.

Schenck, Mary Jane. "Deconstructed Meaning in ['A Good Man Is Hard to Find']," [Originally published under title: "Deconstructed Meaning in Two Short Stories by Flannery O'Connor"] Rpt. from from Ambiguities in Literature and Film. Ed. Hans P. Braendlin (Tallahassee: Florida State UP,: 125-35.

Tate, J.O. "A Good Source Is Not So Hard to Find," Rpt. from The Flannery O'Connor Bulletin 9 (1980): 98-102.

This descriptive review is adapted from: Scott, R. Neil. FLANNERY O'CONNOR: AN ANNOTATED REFERENCE GUIDE TO CRITICISM, (Timberlane Books, 2002). [Designated as a CHOICE "Outstanding Academic Title"). Order from: [...]