A Good Man is Hard to Find is the first short story collection by Flannery O’Conner. O’Conner became known for her literary contribution to the Southern Gothic genre, and her unusual brand of Christian allegory that incorporated a predominance of “grotesque” characters. A major theme throughout the majority of the works in this collection focus on redemption and the achievement of religious or spiritual “grace” through hardship and violence. The majority of O’Conner’s characters are portrayed as both morally and physically ugly, and very few – if any – are shown in a positive light. This is especially true of women and children, who tend to fare the worst in O’Conner’s fiction. O’Conner does not typically provide characters for the reader to empathize with or “root for,” as her main focus is illustrating the spiritual failings of individuals (and sometimes society as a whole) through the open display of these severe character flaws, often personifying them externally as physical defects (ugliness) or abnormalities (missing limbs).

The collection gets its name from the first short story, and it is easy to see why it was chosen to represent (in name) this body of work. A Good Man is Hard to Find is easily one of the collection’s strongest works, following a grandmother and her family’s run-in with an escaped convict self-dubbed The Misfit. The brutality of the story’s gradual conclusion is emotionally jarring (despite its understated delivery) and threatens to stay with the reader permanently. Other stories in the collection that match the intensity and/or excellence of this piece include The River, about a neglected child’s encounter with religion, as well as The Life You Save May Be Your Own and Good Country People, both of which feature missing limbs, traveling con artists, the potential of redemption. Good Country People also includes the fall of a self-proclaimed intellectual, another of O’Conner’s favorite targets.

The weakest work of the collection is easily A Temple of the Holy Ghost, which – much like the title itself – abandons O’Conner’s normal allegorical subtext early on and instead launches into bald-faced proselytizing, eschewing the more calculated symbolism and metaphor for which O’Conner is well more known. The Artificial *title omitted because of Amazon’s automatic filters* is almost guilty of the same, as the narrator goes to great lengths to explain the spiritual transformation of the characters at the end, but overall it isn’t enough to ruin the story of a Grandfather and Grandson’s eventful trip into “the city.”

A stroke of Good Fortune, A Circle in the Fire, and A Late Encounter with the Enemy, while not at the best of the bunch, are still solid entries that easily display O’Conner’s literary talents, and support her ongoing theme of grotesque characters, while exploring subject matter slightly removed from spiritual grace, including the arrogance of the individual’s perceived control over body (A Stroke of Good Fortune), personal history (A Late Encounter with the Enemy),, nature, and even other people (A Circle in the Fire).

Personally, the piece in O’Conner’s collection that I struggled the most with is The Displaced Person. It is an impressive short story in three parts that tackles a multitude of subjects, among them racism, xenophobia, morality, patriotism, control, pride, sloth, and yes, redemption. The story follows a widowed farm owner who takes in an immigrant family from Poland as a working tenant at the bequest of a local priest. All of O’Connor’s trademark elements are present, with all of the major characters driven by character flaws that prevent them from seeing the hypocrisy or illogic in their decision making and world view. However, O’Conner’s handling of the immigrant farm hand, Mr. Guizac, is enough of a departure from O’Conner’s norm to - at the very least – raise some questions. Throughout the other works in this collection, there are rarely any true “innocents” on hand, and even those few characters that could be perceived as innocent, such as young Harry Ashfield in The River, still display character flaws as well as a need or desire for redemption. Mr. Gulzac, however, is never demonstrated to have any outward corruption or deficiencies. Any “flaws” ascribed to Mr. Gulzac are done so through the biased filters of the other characters, and are obviously done so erroneously out of xenophobia, jealousy, fear, or false morality. This is at least partly due to the fact that, unlike the vast majority of major characters in O’Conner’s stories, the narrator never describes any of Mr. Gulzac’s actions from his point of view. Practically all other characters are given at least a brief POV by the narrator, or at the very least have some personal backstory presented as context, but Mr. Gulzac’s own perspective is never truly presented by the narrator. Whenever we see Mr. Gulzac, it is through the eyes of another character, or through the straight-forward impersonal descriptions of the narrator. It is almost as if O’Connor (intentionally or otherwise) makes the geographically displaced Mr. Gulzac a displaced entity in the story, somehow not even belonging in the narrative itself. This emotional distance from the reader mirrors the distance that separates him from other characters, but without the warped prism of bias and prejudice that O’Conner’s other characters exhibit, this distance lends Mr. Gulzac a perception of innocence by omission; other characters reveal their flawed logic and morality through the narrator, but all we are shown of Mr. Gulzac is the hard work and competency that draws the ire and envy of others.

This distance from Mr. Gulzac in the story highlights my other problem with The Displaced Person, the story’s ending. O’Conner’s other stories tend to end after the climactic or transformative action occurs, with the redemption or ultimate results left open and undetermined (The River might be the only other exception to this, depending on your own interpretation). The Displaced Person, however, takes the reader beyond the tragic climax of the ending and offers an uncharacteristic denouement that delivers a level of closure. It almost feels as if O’Connor feels compelled to offer up some semblance of justice – a rarity in the O’Connor universe – for the treatment of that rarest of all O’Connor character, the innocent.

Of course, these are not major faults in The Displaced Man as they are perceived variations of the collected works, and with the possible exception of A Temple of the Holy Ghost, every story in this collection is powerful enough to stand on its own. If you are unfamiliar with the Southern Gothic genre, this collection of stories is an excellent place to start.

Somehow, despite being an English teacher, despite loving Southern Gothic writing, despite the fact that I now teach at a Catholic high school (and my extended family is at least somewhat Catholic), despite my love of dark humor and outcasts writing about society, I made it very far into my life without reading a word by Flannery O’Connor. More than forty years, in fact, which meant that I was actually pretty excited to read A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories after not getting to it for so long – and all the more disappointed when I found myself respecting the book a lot, but not particularly enjoying it.

Let’s get out of the way: O’Connor absolutely knows how to write her characters and her stories; indeed, over the course of these tales, it’s hard to escape how much she nails the mundane hypocrisies and interactions of Southern towns, or the ways that Christianity infuses so much of life even without explicitly being a part of it. She perfectly captures people’s selfish actions and their cruelties, the perverse moments where they’ll do something mean without even thinking about the ramification; and yes, there’s a dark humor through all of it as she sees human nature through the lens of that nihilistic cruelty so many people are capable of.

And yet, as much as I admire her craft, and I respect her ability to write characters, and admit that there’s a dark sense of irony and humor to it all, I found myself struggling to find much to enjoy here. Much as I did with Shirley Jackson’s collection of short stories, I found myself intellectually engaged but often frustrated with the stories themselves, which are often more oblique and “literary” than I find satisfying. (It doesn’t help that the story opens with its best entry, the title story, which does live up to its reputation and then some, but also sets a bar for the rest of the book to live up to, as well as setting expectations about what’s to come that don’t quite fit the other stories in the collection.) For as Gothic and stark as her worldview can be, O’Connor never quite hit my sweet spot of nasty fun that the best stories do (as ever, my go-to example here is Jackson’s “Possibility of Evil,” one of the most flawless stories ever written about small town hypocrisy and the perverse cruelty of people).

Is Flannery O’Connor a worthy writer? Oh, heavens, yes; her prose, her mood, her perfect sense of how people act towards each other – all of it absolutely recreates so many interactions I’ve watched in my life, particularly between Southerners of a certain age. But my appreciation never moved from respect and admiration into passion and love, sadly. It’s very good, yes, but it’s not something that I found myself motivated to read more of – and the fault, I know, is in me and not the stories, but that’s how it goes sometimes.

To describe Flannery O'Connor's work would take oodles of pages of analysis and I believe a simple review of these short stories won't do it justice. Yet there are some profound themes and effects of her writing that leave me simply dazed when I head-rush into the conclusion of her stories. The most full-bodied effect of her writing for me is that it challenges your assumptions about life and people in general, remembering that you yourself have alot in common with her characters than you think, and the Great I AM, God through Jesus, who is in ultimate control of salvation. Her stories paint how Grace meets people on their level to level their self-righteous character, even through violence.

O'Connor's style is a Southern gothic writer who grabs theological themes of her Catholic faith to describe life stories. Then she throws in a combination of profound tapestry of prose that throws sticks of insightful dynamite that blow up circumstances into finding a conclusions that we don't really think about. Insights into relationships, death, and our own hypocrisy before a just and Holy God.

A majority of stories take stock characters who tend to be bizarre, hypocritical, self-righteous, but ironically good in our eyes to say in the least. They're honest and good on the outside, but have thoughts, actions, and feelings that contradict their outside character. Their decisions have strong and personal effects on the people around them. The grandmother from "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is a prime example, of how her selfish pride ends up causing her whole family into a disastrous, violent end. The main character of each story ends up in a moral conundrum, violent, or bizarre situation where they see the end of their wits and realize that their life, righteousness, and goodness don't belong to them at all. Their true wickedness and reality are exposed in that event or through another unwitting person. They experience grace from God as they realize they don't hold their life in their own hands, He does.

The other main character are O'Connor's symbols. Colors from the Catholic color symbol-wheel are ever present in which she intentionally places them on people or objects of worth. Certain objects like the sun and the sky play ever-consuming roles as the stories come to conclusions. Be on the lookout for these, because they enhance the double view of how O'Connor brings these stories to wraps.

From life situations that we face everyday, O'Connor drops spiritual awakenings in her main characters that blends the literal and the fantastic. That's what makes her stories so creative and profound - not just a narrative where there are neat conclusions and characters "win." These are stories where assuming characters believe that they are sure-fire winners in all that they do, then they meet what Grace and repentance truly are, the coming of the end of self and knowing that it is in Christ's sacrifice all sin is destroyed. It is humbling, life-changing, and give the reader something to chew on about their own life.

Not giving this one my normal Pro/Con review. The writing itself was excellent, truly amazing. The content, however, was just way too dark for me and was not what I normally hope for in a read. Reading to me is escapism, like a REALLY inexpensive vacation. This one was not at all that, but a dark journey to a place with little light and no hope. Got and read it for a book club, and I learned a lot from the skillful craft of Flannery O'Connor. I only wish the content had been equally engaging.

Having now read A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND for the first time, I am left to ponder how it is that I never read it before in the fifty-five-plus years I have been reading. Since high school I had been dimly aware of the name of Flannery O'Connor, and I associated her with the South and with short stories. But I had never been given sufficient reason to make a point of reading her until last spring when my son was assigned three of her stories in his junior year English class. In my junior year of high school back in the mid-Sixties I was assigned a number of Shakespeare plays - a much-valued component of my education, to be sure, but that education would not have been compromised if instead of "The Merchant of Venice" I had read O'Connor's "The Life You Save May Be Your Own", or "A Temple of the Holy Ghost", or any of the other stories in this book.

This is the book with which Flannery O'Connor made her mark on American letters. First published in 1955, it contains ten stories that all would merit inclusion in any anthology of short stories or American fiction. The first word that pops into my head to describe them is "weird". They are neither trendy nor sophisticated. The characters are nominally Southern, but in truth they are simply human. They are sweaty and they are petty. Many are somewhat addled, desperately trying to hang on to what little they have both materially and in terms of their self-image. And in each story a calamity, cruelty, or savagery befalls one or more of the characters. The stories are pervaded by some sort of Christian theology that I am sure many books and graduate theses seek to explain. Nonetheless, as I personally can testify, a reader need not share O'Connor's religious view, or hold any religious view whatsoever, to find that her stories are damned powerful. And to be utterly bewitched by them.

The writing is finely crafted. The language is plain-spoken, often studded with regional (or perhaps idiosyncratic) idioms. The stories are not PC by today's standards, but then neither is the world PC. And the un-PC world of the rural South is O'Connor's métier. There are numerous outbursts - like shooting stars - of devilishly wicked humor. And memorable similes are frequent. (For example: "She leaned a little closer and got a whiff of him that was like putting her nose under a buzzard's wing"; "The graduates in their heavy robes [during an outdoor college graduation ceremony] looked as if the last beads of ignorance were being sweated out of them"; "Whenever he thought of [his dead wife], he felt his heart go down like an old bucket into a dry well.")

Just as the adjective "Kafkaesque" is a tribute to the distinctiveness of that peculiar Jewish German Czech who died early from consumption, so too there could be an adjective ("Flanneryistic"?) that denotes and honors the distinctiveness of that Roman Catholic Irishwoman from Georgia who died early from Lupus. Flannery O'Connor certainly is as distinctive an American fictional voice as Mark Twain, William Faulkner, or anyone else you might propose.

The characters in these ten stories are invariably grotesque -- ugly of body and mind, perverse and/or perverted, and mostly moronic -- but they are not incredible. They're all revoltingly real, as recognizable as the most hideous sinners in a Bosch painting, unerringly portrayed specimens of human devolution in the racist impoverishment and isolation of the American South. Whether equally loathsome characters could be matched in stories of other regions isn't in question; all of Flannery O'Connor's gargoyles are from the South. Also NOT in question is O'Connor's genius with words. Here's her first-paragraph intoduction of one of her monsters:

"Besides the neutral expression that she wore when she was alone, Mrs. Freeman had two others, forward and reverse, that she used for all her human dealings. Her forward expression was steady and driving like the advance of a heavy truck. Her eyes never swerved to left or right but turned as the story turned as if they followed a yellow line down the center of it. She seldom used the others expression because it was not often necessary for her to retract a statement, but when she did, her face came to a complete stop, there was an almost imperceptible movement of her black eyes, during which they seemed to be receding, and then the observer would see that Mrs. Freeman, though she might stand there as real as several grain sacks thrown on top of each other, was no longer there in spirit."

Oh my! That woman is REAL. But however realistic O'Connor's grotesque characters might be, the situations in which they are placed in these stories are flamboyantly bizarre, at the edge of plausibility. That pattern is so marked that one has to ask why. It's probably pre-post-modernist of me to ask, but I will anyway: what on earth is the intention behind this so-well-written weirdness?

Humor? Caricature? One could imagine that the Coen Brothers turned to O'Connor for ideas their ferocious mockery of the South in their film "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" The tenor is awfully close.

Or simple sensationalism for the sake of sales? Plenty of that around today, but O'Connor wrote these stories in the 1940s, and I can't help suspecting that she had more earnest intentions than selling to the New Yorker.

Self-loathing? An indictment of her own milieu? Some of the younger and less deformed of her characters do express an aspiration to get out of the muck of their lives. Did she? I almost never want to know details of the lives of authors; if 'it' isn't in the words of the writing, it isn't there at all. What I know about O'Connor is that she died young, and if her short life was enclosed in the world she describes, it's no wonder!

I also know, inadvertently from other reviews, that O'Connor was Catholic, that her writings are taken by critics to have meanings related to her Catholicism. Frankly, I have trouble with that thought. If we are supposed to perceive the innate depravity of humankind, and the lust for any kind of salvation, then O'Connor goes too far toward Gnosticism. To suggest that the depraved 'souls' of her stories were created in G_d's image is to deny the sublimity of the Divine. Perhaps the Catholicism of her 'South' had inherited the Cathar dualism, or else exchanged genetic particles with the most extreme Calvinism. Or perhaps O'Connor was on her way, in these early stories, toward 'painting herself into a corner' in her struggle with the ideas of sin and redemption. There is a priest, by the way, in the last story of the collection, but he is a simpering fool, the closest thing in the book to an outright caricature.

The first five stories of this collection could be brushed aside, as just writing for writing's sake, but the sixth story, "The Artificial Ni__er", is a mind-blower, a monument in the graveyard of literature, that extinct human pursuit. Plainly I've got to read the rest of O'Connor's work before the prions get the rest of my brain...

If you are a fan of Flannery O'Connor then you know what you're in for. If you've never read her works then hold on... it's a different kind of ride.

Some of what you read will have you laughing out loud... and hard! But every story will have a dark, if not disturbing, twist. The grandmother in "A Good Man is Hard to Find" reminded me quite a bit of my own grandmother in that she was prim, proper, and yet manipulative as hell... in a very funny way. And the darker characters were, at first, like any ol' redneck you might run into in the old, deep south. But then the darkness sets in... and man, it leaves you shocked and silent.

Don't read unless you want to be slightly depressed. Good cerebral read that I do occasionally enjoy.

The first time I read a Flannery O'Connor short story Good Country People I should'nt have been surprised at the ending It was in an anthology of tales of horror and the supernatural that i read years ago. Yet the characters in this well written bit of Southern literature (included here) were plain farm folk, concerned about Hulga a young relative who walked with a wooden leg and just earned a masters degree with honors. Neither attribute made her a desirable wife in farm country. Would spinsterhood be her fate? Not if O'Connor has a say. Along comes a glib Bible salesman who ingratitates himself with the older women and arouses Hulga's curiosity. She secretly meets him without telling anyone where she is going. What happens next is beyond the average imagination. Subtle suspense builds into a psychological act of horror you feel but don't see unfold until it's too late for Hulga and the reader. Then, pow!

I bought A Good Man Is Hard To Find in paperback and Kindle from Amazon to enable me to read its 279 pages fast enough to use for my next book review as a facilitator. Each story, I discovered, is unique and hints from the first that the main characters will undo themselves. Examples: In the title story a loquacious grandma on the drive to Florida with her son's family doesn't know when to keep quiet. She demands her own way even when an outcome is dubious. The two flaws draw a horrible conclusion to the vacation trip.

In The Life You Save May Be Your Own Mrs. Carter, an aged woman, gives Tom Shiftlet, 'a tramp',shelter on her farm in exchange for free labor. He works well and hard and Mrs. Carter sees him as a suitor to Lucy her mute daughter who Tom has taught her first word. Desperate to see Lucy taken care of when she dies Mrs. Carter bribes him to take a wife. The two marry and go on a honeymoon in the broken down car Tomrepaired.. Happy ending? Forget it! Instead, the horror thata stronger person is able to inflict on an innocent made me ask as I did with Hulga's story, "what happens to Lucy now?"

The other seven stories in this single anthology have a similar effect. The simple writing style with its vivid descriptions of place and person stays with you and raises questions. You can't help trying to unscramble the subtlety O'Connor's uses to show tensions that make people cruel. O'Connor died at age 41 after fighting lupus erythematosus for ten years, the same idisease that killed her father when she was a teenager.

J’étais satisfaite sur tous les plans!

Flannery O'Connor's 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories' is a profound exploration of the human condition. O'Connor's unique blend of Southern Gothic and Christian themes creates a stark and unsettling landscape. The stories, while deeply disturbing at times, are a testament to O'Connor's mastery of the short story form. However, the book might not appeal to everyone due to its dark and often violent content. Nonetheless, for those who appreciate thought-provoking literature, this collection is a must-read.

I officially have a new favorite writer. When I'm a millionaire I'm going to buy thousands of copies of this collection so that I can get it into every library in the UK; she's highly regarded but still highly underrated, less well known than she should be. I listen to a lot of American literary professors on audio, several have used O'Connor's genius to illustrate a point. Consequently, I thought I'd give her a read.

I think my head has exploded. I've laughed. I've been horrified. I've philosophized.

I've been in awe of the prefiguring, the irony, the characters, the plots and the numerous subtle observations of people. The characters are alive; they have everything that a real person has.

I've read each story twice so far and I will read them again and again. On the second reading I appreciated O'Connor's genius much more than the first time around.

La obra se compone de una serie de relatos más o menos breves, con lo cual siempre es agradable para leer en tus ratos libres. La acción en los relatos siempre tiene lugar en el Deep South estadounidense y la autora respeta el dialecto propio de esta zona, así que el inglés a veces es complicado de entender (incluso para un nivel C2); no imposible de seguir, sino que tendréis que recurrir alguna que otra vez al diccionario.

En cuanto a la edición, es normalita. Tapa blanda, hojas finas, letra un poco más pequeña de lo que me suele gustar a mí... pero buena compra. ¡Por este precio, es un buen libro a tener en vuestras bibliotecas!

not my kind of people but writing very good