A Good Man is Hard to Find

Flannery O’Connor originally published the short story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” in the 1953 anthology The Avon Book of Modern Writing. It subsequently appeared in several other collections and is today one of O’Connor’s most famous works. It is also one of the best-known examples of the Southern Gothic genre, which O’Connor explored in most of her writing. This genre is characterized by its emphasis on the interplay between grace and the grotesque, as well as its exploration of the post-Civil War American South.

The story is set in Georgia in what is presumed to be the early 1950s. The main characters, members of a Southern family, are Bailey; his unnamed wife; their children, eight-year-old John Wesley, his younger singer, June Star, and a baby; and the grandmother, who is never named. At the start of the story, the grandmother is trying to convince her son Bailey to take the family to Tennessee for their summer vacation instead of Florida so that she can visit some old friends. In an attempt to convince him, she references recent news reports of

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