A Good Man is Hard to Find Essay -- Literary Analysis, Flannery OConn

A brilliant storyteller during the mid-twentieth century, Flannery O'Connor wrote intriguing tales of morality, ethics and religion. A Southern writer, she wrote in the Southern Gothic style, cataloging thirty-two short stories; the most well known being â€Å"A Good Man is Hard to Find.† Mary Flannery O'Connor was born on March 25, 1925, in Savannah, Georgia. Raised in her mother's family home in Milledgeville, Georgia, she was the only child of Regina Cline and Edward Francis O'Connor, Jr. Although little is known about Mrs. O'Connor's early childhood, in Melissa Simpson's biography on O'Connor, Simpson states that O'Connor attended St. Vincent's Grammar School in Savannah where she would rarely play with the other children and spent most her time reading by herself. After fifth, grade, O'Connor transferred; to Sacred Heart Grammar School for Girls; some say the reason for the transfer was that it was a more prestigious school than the former. She later enrolled in Peabody High School in 1938, entered an accelerated program at Georgia State Collge for Women in the summer of 1942, and in 1946 she was accepted into the Iowa Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa (4 Simpson). According to American Decades, O'Connor earned her masters degree from the University of Iowa with six short-stories that were published in the periodical Accent (n pg Baughman). After college, O'Connor's writing career continued. During her brief career as a writer, O'Connor contracted lupus in which she ultimately died. In Short Stories for Students, Kathleen Wilson states that while O’Connor was writing her first novel Wise Blood, which she started while attending the prestigious Yaddo writers’ colony, she suffered her first attack of lupus, a chronic, ... ...Grandmother† (O’Connor 179). The Grandmother’s deviousness and immorality is evident in the beginning of the story. While reading the newspaper article about the Misfit, the Grandmother brings it to Bailey’s attention. In Short Story Criticism, Mary Jane Schenck writes â€Å"For Bailey, the newspaper story is not important or meaningful, and for the Grandmother it does not represent a real threat but is part of a ploy to get her own way† (Schenck 220). â€Å"A Good Man is Hard to Find† begins with an innocent road trip, however, due to coercion by the Grandmother; it soon turns into a fatal nightmare. In Short Story Criticism, Martha Stephens writes â€Å"†¦ it is true that in a trivial sense everything that happens is the Grandmother’s fault†¦Ã¢â‚¬  She continues with â€Å"It is in the conscious of the Grandmother that we continue to experience the action of the story†¦Ã¢â‚¬  (Stephens 196).