Short Stories
44 Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)
Biography
In 1925, Mary Flannery O’Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia. She lived there in the home where she was born until 1940. An Orthodox Catholic family, the O’Connors lived in Lafayette Square, a largely Catholic neighbourhood of Savannah, mainly through the generosity of her second cousin, Kate Semmes (whom O’Connor would call “Cousin Katie”). In 1936, O’Connor’s father, Edwin, was diagnosed with lupus and was hospitalized in Atlanta; his diagnosis would later force the family to leave Savannah. While Edwin sought treatment, Flannery and her mother, Regina, would often stay with family in Milledgeville.
In 1941, Edwin’s death would imprint itself on O’Connor, who was close with her father. Flannery and her mother subsequently moved to live at Andalusia, the maternal family farm in Milledgeville. After high school, O’Connor enrolled in Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College & State University) in Milledgeville, where she completed a degree in English and sociology. After college, O’Connor enrolled in journalism school at the University of Iowa but, once there, enrolled in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was able to work with many of the most influential writers of her time.
At the Writers’ Workshop, O’Connor established herself as one of their most promising writers, winning a book contract, as well as a prestigious writer’s fellowship in New York. However, after being diagnosed with lupus in 1951, Flannery O’Connor returned to Andalusia, where she remained. At the age of twenty-five, she published her first novel, Wise Blood (1952), and followed it up with her first collection of short stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (1955). Her second published novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960), was nominated for a National Book Award. Up until her death from lupus, at the young age of thirty-nine, she was working on her second collection of stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965). In 1971, O’Connor’s friend and literary executor, Sally Fitzgerald, helped publish The Complete Stories, which won the National Book Award and was later awarded the Reader’s Choice Best of the National Book Awards (2010).
O’Connor’s fiction is famous for its Southern Gothic settings and her use of dark humour. Other themes in her fiction include the following her relationship with her mother, life at Andalusia, and her Orthodox Catholicism. “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is one of O’Connor’s most anthologized stories and one of her most violent. The story follows a family of six who, while on vacation to Florida, encounter The Misfit, a pensive, yet troubled serial killer, and one of O’Connor’s most famous characters. The Misfit states that his troubles centre on Christ’s claims of resurrecting the dead.
A Good Man Is Hard to Find
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