Customer Reviews
Oddball prophets caught in the web they wove themselves. - By: Themis-Athena, 26 May 2004 
They are misfits, wanderers, & souls searching for faith & absolution. Many of them are, to one extent or another, hypocrites; others are almost unbelievably naive. All of them are Southerners - & yet, even the most outlandish among Flannery O'Connor's protagonists come across as entirely believable, complex characters whom, regardless of location, you might expect to come acrossin your own travels, too; & there is no telling how such an encounter would turn out.
Of course, you would hope it does not prove quite as disastrous as the title story's chance meeting of a family taking a wrong turn (on the road as much as figuratively) & the self-proclaimed Misfit haunting that particular area of Georgia; which culminatesin a bizarre conversation, the failure of communication underneath which only adds to the reader's growing feeling of helplessnessin view of impending doom. And such a sense of irreversible destiny pervades many a storyin this collection; yet, while asin O'Connor's writingin general, her & her protagonists' Catholic faith plays a dominant rolein the course of the events, that course is not so much brought about by the hand of God as by the characters' own acts, decisions, judgments & prejudices.
Freakish as they are, O'Connor's (anti-)heroes are meant to be prophets, messengers of a long forgotten responsibility, as she explainedin her 1963 essay "The Catholic Novelistin the Protestant South:" their prophecy is "a matter of seeing near things with their extensions of meaning & thus of seeing far things close up." Often, she uses names, titles & items of every day life & imbues them with a new meaningin the context of her stories; this collection's title story, for example, is named for a blues song popularized by Bessie Smithin the late 1920s, & a cautionary road sign commonly seenin the 1950s ("The Life You Save May Be Your Own") becomes the title & motto of a story about a wanderer's encounter with a mother & her handicapped daughter who take him in, only to use that purported charity to their own advantage - at the end of which, predictably, nobody is the better off. Indeed, the endings of O'Connor's stories are as far from your standard happy ending as you can imagine; & while you cannot help but develop, early on, a premonition of doom, most of the time the precise nature of that doom is anything but predictable.
"A Good Man is Hard to Find & Other Stories" was Flannery O'Connor's first published collection of short stories; yet, by the time these stories appeared (nine of the ten were publishedin various magazines between 1953 & 1955 before their inclusionin this 1955 collection) she was already an accomplished writer, with not only a novel under her belt ("Wise Blood," 1952) but also, & significantly, a master's thesis likewise consisting of a collection of short stories, entitled "The Geranium & Other Stories" (1947; first published as a collectionin 1971's National Book Award winning "The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor," although several of those stories had likewise been published individually before). Two of the stories includedin "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" count among O'Connor's six winners of the O'Henry Award for Short Fiction ("The Life You Save May Be Your Own" & "The Circlein the Fire," again an exploration of insincerity, half-hearted charity & its exploitation); & the collection as a whole, even more than her first novel, quickly established her as a masterful storyteller, endowed with vision, an unfailing sense for language & a supreme feeling for the use of irony; all of which have long since placed her firmlyin the first tier of 20th century American authors.
Flannery O'Connor died, at the age of 39, of lupus, an inflammatory disease whichin less severe forms may not be more than an (albeit substantial) nuisance, but which proved fatalin her case as well as that of her father before her. Her literary career, almost the sole focus of her life from the moment that she was diagnosed onwards, was thus cut short way before her time. Yet, to this day her writing holds a unique positionin contemporary literature; & "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is an excellent place to start exploring her work.
Much savagery,compassion,farce,art and truth have gone into - By: , 30 Nov 1999 
I thought this was a well written book. The way she used her instrument are a brutal irony, a slam-bang humor & a style of writing as balefully direct as a deathe sentence. The displaced person, the story of an outsider who desstroys the balance of life between blacks & whites on a small southern farm, has been adapted into a powerful drama for television.
