Title

O'Connor: ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’

Authors

Files

Description

A brief commentary prepared by Brother Tom Wendorf, S.M., PhD, national vocation director, Marianist Province of the United States, on the following work:

Flannery O'Connor
A Good Man is Hard to Find
ca. 1955; first edition

Comments

A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955), Flannery O’Connor’s first published collection of short stories, arguably established O’Connor as a Southern, American, Catholic woman writer.Though O’Connor’s first published book, the novel Wise Blood (1952), met initially with mixed reviews, A Good Man Is Hard to Find sold comparatively well and met critical praise, including Evelyn Waugh’s telling exclamation, “If these stories are in fact the work of a young lady, they are indeed remarkable.” But O’Connor lamented that her work, at times startling to readers, was often misunderstood.In this volume, O’Connor reveals her fictional tendency toward extremes, having understood that she was a Catholic believer writing for an audience largely of unbelievers: “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures,” she would say of her aesthetic approach.

Permission Statement

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Streaming Media

Contents of Streaming Media

Sheila Hassell Hughes, professor of English, reads a selection.