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

A brilliant storyteller during the mid-twentieth century, Flannery OConnor 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 A Good Man is Hard to Find.Mary Flannery OConnor was born on March 25, 1925, in Savannah, Georgia. Raised in her mothers family home in Milledgeville, Georgia, she was the only child of Regina Cline and Edward Francis OConnor, Jr. Although little is known about Mrs. OConnors early childhood, in Melissa Simpsons biography on OConnor, Simpson states that OConnor attended St. Vincents Grammar School in Savannah where she would rarely play with the other children and spent most her time reading by herself. After fifth, grade, OConnor transferred to Sacred bosom 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 quicken program at Georgia State Collge for Women in the summer of 1942, and in 1946 she was accepted into the Iowa Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa (4 Simpson). According to American Decades, OConnor earned her masters tip from the University of Iowa with six short-stories that were published in the periodical Accent (n pg Baughman).After college, OConnors writing career continued. During her brief career as a writer, OConnor contracted lupus in which she eventually died. In perfectly Stories for Students, Kathleen Wilson states that while OConnor 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, ... ... gran (OConnor 179). The Grandmothers deviousness and immorality is evident in the beginning of the story. While reading the newspaper article about the Misfit, the Grandmother brings it to Baileys attention. In Short Story Criticism, Mary Jane Schenck writes For Bailey, the newspaper story is not important or meaningful, and for the Grandmother it does not represent a real threat but is instigate of a ploy to get her own way (Schenck 220). 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 it is true that in a trivial sense everything that happens is the Grandmothers stain She continues with It is in the conscious of the Grandmother that we continue to experience the action of the story (Stephens 196).