O’Connor’s Mission

It is a given that Flannery O’Connor is one of the most recognized southern female writers. This is mostly due to the pure religious content and reality in her writings. One of those stories, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” is one that combines her love of religion with her personal experience. It is a story on which its simple beginning tricks the reader, and its complex ending brings both questions and tears. What looks like just a field trip vacation turns into an unnecessary massacre for the purpose of understanding both religion and the human race. In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” O’Connor is able to leave impressions of her life on the location, characters, and scenes by the use of her love of religion and life experiences.

Most of her life, Flannery O’Connor traveled around the United States, yet most of her life was spent in a place near Milledgeville, Georgia (May 17). On this detail, we can infer that it was no coincidence that she picked Georgia as her starting location for the story. It was a town she knew best, and could certainly describe to the perfection any places that she would’ve wanted to add. In the case of the story, O’Connor only describes one place, The Tower, and a little restaurant inside it where the family dines in. “The tower was a part stucco and part filling station and dance hall set in a clearing outside the Timothy” (O’Connor 302). Deferring from this description, O’Connor must have been in that place at least ten times; because a person who has never been to Georgia could never know what The Tower, its location and the Timothy were, nor would they have been able to guess on such a place. O’Connor included some of her life settings in order to make the story’s setting more realistic and credib...

... middle of paper ...

...ically with “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” Flannery O’Connor shows her biography to the world, and keeps her identity hidden while making a realistic story that we can all learn and ponder about.

Works Cited

"Flannery O’Connor." Georgia Literary Festival. Georgia College and state University, 12 Dec 2000. Web. 27 Mar 2012. .

Magee, Rosemary M. Conversations with Flannery O'Connor. Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1987. 5-10. Print.

May, Charles “Career, Life, and Influence” Critical Insights Flannery O'Connor. 1st edition. Salem Press, 2012. 3-22. Print.

O’Connor Flannery “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” The Norton Introduction To Literature. Shorter 10th ed. Booth, Alison, and Kelly J. Mays. New York, London: W.W. Norton & Co Inc., 2010. 299-310. Print.