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A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories Kindle Edition

4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 1,580 ratings

An essential collection of classic stories that established Flannery O’Connor’s reputation as an American master of fiction—now with a new introduction by New York Times bestselling author Lauren Groff In 1955, with the title story and others in this critical edition, Flannery O’Connor firmly laid claim to her place as one of the most original and provocative writers of her generation. Steeped in a Southern Gothic tradition that would become synonymous with her name, these stories show O’Connor’s unique view of life—infused with religious symbolism, haunted by apocalyptic possibility, sustained by the tragic comedy of human behavior, confronted by the necessity of salvation. These classic stories—including “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “Good Country People,” and “The Displaced Person,” among others, are sure to inspire future generations of fans and remind existing readers why she remains a master of the short story.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Among America's greatest short story writers ever (one of the country's biggest story prizes is named after her) O'Connor's often-nightmarish, always-enthralling spins on the Southern Gothic bloom with dark humor and deep compassion that belie the bleakness of her characters' emotional and physical landscapes. In these ten indelible tales, undying faith commingles with cynicism, beauty with brutality, transformation with tradition, good country people with cold-blooded killers." --O, The Oprah Magazine

About the Author

FLANNERY O'CONNOR was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925. She was awarded the Best of the National Book Awards for Fiction in 2009, and she was the first fiction writer born in the twentieth century to have her works collected and published by the Library of America. When she died at the age of thirty-nine, America lost one of its most gifted writers at the height of her powers.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B003PDMN18
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Mariner Books Classics (October 15, 1992)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 15, 1992
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 1314 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 278 pages
  • Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 0156364654
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 1,580 ratings

About the author

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Flannery O'Connor
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Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1925, the only child of Catholic parents. In 1945 she enrolled at the Georgia State College for Women. After earning her degree she continued her studies on the University of Iowa's writing program, and her first published story, 'The Geranium', was written while she was still a student. Her writing is best-known for its explorations of religious themes and southern racial issues, and for combining the comic with the tragic. After university, she moved to New York where she continued to write. In 1952 she learned that she was dying of lupus, a disease which had afflicted her father. For the rest of her life, she and her mother lived on the family dairy farm, Andalusia, outside Millidgeville, Georgia. For pleasure she raised peacocks, pheasants, swans, geese, chickens and Muscovy ducks. She was a good amateur painter. She died in the summer of 1964.

Photo by Cmacauley [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

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4.2 out of 5 stars
1,580 global ratings

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Customers say

Customers find the storytelling compelling and well-written. They praise the writing style as lucid and eloquent. The stories are thought-provoking, profound, and symbolic. Many readers consider the book a great value for the price. It offers an interesting view into Southern literature and country vernacular. Opinions differ on the humor and character development, with some finding it amusing and entertaining, while others find the world mean and hypocritical.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

61 customers mention "Storytelling quality"46 positive15 negative

Customers enjoy the storytelling quality of the book. They find the stories compelling, focused, and well-written. The title story is an eye-popper, and the stories have a spiritual edge. Readers describe the collection as classic American fiction that they can relate to and feel they know the characters.

"...It is an impressive short story in three parts that tackles a multitude of subjects, among them racism, xenophobia, morality, patriotism, control,..." Read more

"...Suffice to say the short stories in this collection are classic American fiction. Every one of them left me unsettled...." Read more

"...That's what makes her stories so creative and profound - not just a narrative where there are neat conclusions and characters "win." These..." Read more

"A well written collection of stories but if I had not researched the life of the author, I would have given it a lesser rating...." Read more

44 customers mention "Writing style"36 positive8 negative

Customers find the writing style engaging and easy to read. They appreciate the author's eloquent views and literary talents. The stories explore profound themes and effects that leave readers dazed. Many consider the book a must-read for writing classes.

"...the best of the bunch, are still solid entries that easily display O’Conner’s literary talents, and support her ongoing theme of grotesque characters..." Read more

"...The writing is finely crafted. The language is plain-spoken, often studded with regional (or perhaps idiosyncratic) idioms...." Read more

"...Yet there are some profound themes and effects of her writing that leave me simply dazed when I head-rush into the conclusion of her stories...." Read more

"...Yet the characters in this well written bit of Southern literature (included here) were plain farm folk, concerned about Hulga a young relative..." Read more

15 customers mention "Thought provoking"12 positive3 negative

Customers find the book thought-provoking and creative. They appreciate the author's sharp insight, wit, and boldness. The writing is symbolic and beautiful, with vivid moments of atmosphere and humor. The commentary on the world and human nature is interesting, humbling, and life-changing.

"...contribution to the Southern Gothic genre, and her unusual brand of Christian allegory that incorporated a predominance of “grotesque” characters...." Read more

"...That's what makes her stories so creative and profound - not just a narrative where there are neat conclusions and characters "win." These..." Read more

"...There are vivid, almost revelatory moments of atmosphere and leaps into sudden humor that underscore the strange (sometimes cruel) behavior in these..." Read more

"...you see what you want to, the world is mostly mean and covered in religious superstition." Read more

14 customers mention "Value for money"14 positive0 negative

Customers find the book a good value for money. They enjoy reading it and appreciate that it's in excellent condition.

"Purchased the book for school. Good for the price." Read more

"...This book is not ideal bedtime reading, but it is worth a read." Read more

"...Thoroughly enjoyed each one and had to digest each story before going on...." Read more

"This is a great great book. The story about the Artificial N… is truly profound. I highly recommend. I’ll look for more of work too." Read more

12 customers mention "Southern literature"12 positive0 negative

Customers enjoy the book's portrayal of Southern life. They find it an interesting view into the past and a classic work. The book is described as timeless and powerful by readers.

"...with religion, as well as The Life You Save May Be Your Own and Good Country People, both of which feature missing limbs, traveling con artists, the..." Read more

"Great literature. I love the portrayal of life in the south... something like a Mark Twain book. What precious characters we have...." Read more

"Truly insightful views of life in the South. Also, views from the early 20th century...." Read more

"Tough read about another time in our country. Fabulous Southern Gothic. Each story made me squirm. Happy we've come so far...." Read more

27 customers mention "Humor"14 positive13 negative

Customers have different views on the humor in the book. Some find it amusing and entertaining, with sarcasm, irony, and the macabre. Others find it offensive, strange, or perverted.

"...the reader beyond the tragic climax of the ending and offers an uncharacteristic denouement that delivers a level of closure...." Read more

"...stories are invariably grotesque -- ugly of body and mind, perverse and/or perverted, and mostly moronic -- but they are not incredible...." Read more

"...There are numerous outbursts - like shooting stars - of devilishly wicked humor. And memorable similes are frequent...." Read more

"...from these stories, it's that you see what you want to, the world is mostly mean and covered in religious superstition." Read more

14 customers mention "Character development"7 positive7 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the character development. Some find the characters precious and human, with a distinct American fictional voice like Mark Twain or William Faulkner. Others say the characters can be unpleasant and cold, with too dark endings.

"...They are neither trendy nor sophisticated. The characters are nominally Southern, but in truth they are simply human...." Read more

"...These stories are focused and they cut deeply. The characters are quirky and judgmental, yet they are lost in thought for much of the time -..." Read more

"...Oh my! That woman is REAL...." Read more

"...The characters are often hypocritical, selfish, evil, or just naive. Though sprinkled with wry humor, the book is simply not pleasant reading." Read more

9 customers mention "Dark content"3 positive6 negative

Customers have differing views on the content. Some find it dark and deep with a bit of humor, while others say it's extremely dark and semi-autobiographical.

"...The stories are obviously semi-autobiographical and extremely dark...." Read more

"I think this is O' Conners best ! Each short story is deep , dark and has a bit of humor...." Read more

"...The content, however, was just way too dark for me and was not what I normally hope for in a read...." Read more

"This book is terribly dark and depressing. I purchased it based on Librarians recommend the books you should read in each decade of your life...." Read more

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Top reviews from the United States

  • Reviewed in the United States on January 10, 2018
    A Good Man is Hard to Find is the first short story collection by Flannery O’Conner. O’Conner became known for her literary contribution to the Southern Gothic genre, and her unusual brand of Christian allegory that incorporated a predominance of “grotesque” characters. A major theme throughout the majority of the works in this collection focus on redemption and the achievement of religious or spiritual “grace” through hardship and violence. The majority of O’Conner’s characters are portrayed as both morally and physically ugly, and very few – if any – are shown in a positive light. This is especially true of women and children, who tend to fare the worst in O’Conner’s fiction. O’Conner does not typically provide characters for the reader to empathize with or “root for,” as her main focus is illustrating the spiritual failings of individuals (and sometimes society as a whole) through the open display of these severe character flaws, often personifying them externally as physical defects (ugliness) or abnormalities (missing limbs).

    The collection gets its name from the first short story, and it is easy to see why it was chosen to represent (in name) this body of work. A Good Man is Hard to Find is easily one of the collection’s strongest works, following a grandmother and her family’s run-in with an escaped convict self-dubbed The Misfit. The brutality of the story’s gradual conclusion is emotionally jarring (despite its understated delivery) and threatens to stay with the reader permanently. Other stories in the collection that match the intensity and/or excellence of this piece include The River, about a neglected child’s encounter with religion, as well as The Life You Save May Be Your Own and Good Country People, both of which feature missing limbs, traveling con artists, the potential of redemption. Good Country People also includes the fall of a self-proclaimed intellectual, another of O’Conner’s favorite targets.

    The weakest work of the collection is easily A Temple of the Holy Ghost, which – much like the title itself – abandons O’Conner’s normal allegorical subtext early on and instead launches into bald-faced proselytizing, eschewing the more calculated symbolism and metaphor for which O’Conner is well more known. The Artificial *title omitted because of Amazon’s automatic filters* is almost guilty of the same, as the narrator goes to great lengths to explain the spiritual transformation of the characters at the end, but overall it isn’t enough to ruin the story of a Grandfather and Grandson’s eventful trip into “the city.”

    A stroke of Good Fortune, A Circle in the Fire, and A Late Encounter with the Enemy, while not at the best of the bunch, are still solid entries that easily display O’Conner’s literary talents, and support her ongoing theme of grotesque characters, while exploring subject matter slightly removed from spiritual grace, including the arrogance of the individual’s perceived control over body (A Stroke of Good Fortune), personal history (A Late Encounter with the Enemy),, nature, and even other people (A Circle in the Fire).

    Personally, the piece in O’Conner’s collection that I struggled the most with is The Displaced Person. It is an impressive short story in three parts that tackles a multitude of subjects, among them racism, xenophobia, morality, patriotism, control, pride, sloth, and yes, redemption. The story follows a widowed farm owner who takes in an immigrant family from Poland as a working tenant at the bequest of a local priest. All of O’Connor’s trademark elements are present, with all of the major characters driven by character flaws that prevent them from seeing the hypocrisy or illogic in their decision making and world view. However, O’Conner’s handling of the immigrant farm hand, Mr. Guizac, is enough of a departure from O’Conner’s norm to - at the very least – raise some questions. Throughout the other works in this collection, there are rarely any true “innocents” on hand, and even those few characters that could be perceived as innocent, such as young Harry Ashfield in The River, still display character flaws as well as a need or desire for redemption. Mr. Gulzac, however, is never demonstrated to have any outward corruption or deficiencies. Any “flaws” ascribed to Mr. Gulzac are done so through the biased filters of the other characters, and are obviously done so erroneously out of xenophobia, jealousy, fear, or false morality. This is at least partly due to the fact that, unlike the vast majority of major characters in O’Conner’s stories, the narrator never describes any of Mr. Gulzac’s actions from his point of view. Practically all other characters are given at least a brief POV by the narrator, or at the very least have some personal backstory presented as context, but Mr. Gulzac’s own perspective is never truly presented by the narrator. Whenever we see Mr. Gulzac, it is through the eyes of another character, or through the straight-forward impersonal descriptions of the narrator. It is almost as if O’Connor (intentionally or otherwise) makes the geographically displaced Mr. Gulzac a displaced entity in the story, somehow not even belonging in the narrative itself. This emotional distance from the reader mirrors the distance that separates him from other characters, but without the warped prism of bias and prejudice that O’Conner’s other characters exhibit, this distance lends Mr. Gulzac a perception of innocence by omission; other characters reveal their flawed logic and morality through the narrator, but all we are shown of Mr. Gulzac is the hard work and competency that draws the ire and envy of others.

    This distance from Mr. Gulzac in the story highlights my other problem with The Displaced Person, the story’s ending. O’Conner’s other stories tend to end after the climactic or transformative action occurs, with the redemption or ultimate results left open and undetermined (The River might be the only other exception to this, depending on your own interpretation). The Displaced Person, however, takes the reader beyond the tragic climax of the ending and offers an uncharacteristic denouement that delivers a level of closure. It almost feels as if O’Connor feels compelled to offer up some semblance of justice – a rarity in the O’Connor universe – for the treatment of that rarest of all O’Connor character, the innocent.

    Of course, these are not major faults in The Displaced Man as they are perceived variations of the collected works, and with the possible exception of A Temple of the Holy Ghost, every story in this collection is powerful enough to stand on its own. If you are unfamiliar with the Southern Gothic genre, this collection of stories is an excellent place to start.
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  • Reviewed in the United States on June 14, 2013
    There's not much more to be said about Flannery O'Connor's body of work, so I won't try. Suffice to say the short stories in this collection are classic American fiction. Every one of them left me unsettled. I can only imagine how people who read them when they were new must have felt. My only beef is how poorly edited this particular edition is. There are many, many instances of incorrect spelling, punctuation, and missing words which left me no choice but to leave off the 5th Star for the Kindle edition.
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  • Reviewed in the United States on July 2, 2012
    Having now read A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND for the first time, I am left to ponder how it is that I never read it before in the fifty-five-plus years I have been reading. Since high school I had been dimly aware of the name of Flannery O'Connor, and I associated her with the South and with short stories. But I had never been given sufficient reason to make a point of reading her until last spring when my son was assigned three of her stories in his junior year English class. In my junior year of high school back in the mid-Sixties I was assigned a number of Shakespeare plays - a much-valued component of my education, to be sure, but that education would not have been compromised if instead of "The Merchant of Venice" I had read O'Connor's "The Life You Save May Be Your Own", or "A Temple of the Holy Ghost", or any of the other stories in this book.

    This is the book with which Flannery O'Connor made her mark on American letters. First published in 1955, it contains ten stories that all would merit inclusion in any anthology of short stories or American fiction. The first word that pops into my head to describe them is "weird". They are neither trendy nor sophisticated. The characters are nominally Southern, but in truth they are simply human. They are sweaty and they are petty. Many are somewhat addled, desperately trying to hang on to what little they have both materially and in terms of their self-image. And in each story a calamity, cruelty, or savagery befalls one or more of the characters. The stories are pervaded by some sort of Christian theology that I am sure many books and graduate theses seek to explain. Nonetheless, as I personally can testify, a reader need not share O'Connor's religious view, or hold any religious view whatsoever, to find that her stories are damned powerful. And to be utterly bewitched by them.

    The writing is finely crafted. The language is plain-spoken, often studded with regional (or perhaps idiosyncratic) idioms. The stories are not PC by today's standards, but then neither is the world PC. And the un-PC world of the rural South is O'Connor's métier. There are numerous outbursts - like shooting stars - of devilishly wicked humor. And memorable similes are frequent. (For example: "She leaned a little closer and got a whiff of him that was like putting her nose under a buzzard's wing"; "The graduates in their heavy robes [during an outdoor college graduation ceremony] looked as if the last beads of ignorance were being sweated out of them"; "Whenever he thought of [his dead wife], he felt his heart go down like an old bucket into a dry well.")

    Just as the adjective "Kafkaesque" is a tribute to the distinctiveness of that peculiar Jewish German Czech who died early from consumption, so too there could be an adjective ("Flanneryistic"?) that denotes and honors the distinctiveness of that Roman Catholic Irishwoman from Georgia who died early from Lupus. Flannery O'Connor certainly is as distinctive an American fictional voice as Mark Twain, William Faulkner, or anyone else you might propose.
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Top reviews from other countries

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  • Casper
    4.0 out of 5 stars Profound Exploration of the Human Condition
    Reviewed in the Netherlands on June 20, 2023
    Flannery O'Connor's 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories' is a profound exploration of the human condition. O'Connor's unique blend of Southern Gothic and Christian themes creates a stark and unsettling landscape. The stories, while deeply disturbing at times, are a testament to O'Connor's mastery of the short story form. However, the book might not appeal to everyone due to its dark and often violent content. Nonetheless, for those who appreciate thought-provoking literature, this collection is a must-read.
  • J. (Just) Frankie
    5.0 out of 5 stars Sehr gut :)
    Reviewed in Canada on September 10, 2019
    Zis is very gut
  • MATHIEU Ruzenka
    5.0 out of 5 stars Très satisfaite. Livre en très bon état, livraison plus rapide que prévu initialement.
    Reviewed in France on September 13, 2020
    J’étais satisfaite sur tous les plans!
  • Mark
    5.0 out of 5 stars I Just can't do them Justice!
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 16, 2016
    I officially have a new favorite writer. When I'm a millionaire I'm going to buy thousands of copies of this collection so that I can get it into every library in the UK; she's highly regarded but still highly underrated, less well known than she should be. I listen to a lot of American literary professors on audio, several have used O'Connor's genius to illustrate a point. Consequently, I thought I'd give her a read.

    I think my head has exploded. I've laughed. I've been horrified. I've philosophized.

    I've been in awe of the prefiguring, the irony, the characters, the plots and the numerous subtle observations of people. The characters are alive; they have everything that a real person has.

    I've read each story twice so far and I will read them again and again. On the second reading I appreciated O'Connor's genius much more than the first time around.
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  • Lamprea
    4.0 out of 5 stars Lectura recomendable
    Reviewed in Spain on May 1, 2016
    La obra se compone de una serie de relatos más o menos breves, con lo cual siempre es agradable para leer en tus ratos libres. La acción en los relatos siempre tiene lugar en el Deep South estadounidense y la autora respeta el dialecto propio de esta zona, así que el inglés a veces es complicado de entender (incluso para un nivel C2); no imposible de seguir, sino que tendréis que recurrir alguna que otra vez al diccionario.
    En cuanto a la edición, es normalita. Tapa blanda, hojas finas, letra un poco más pequeña de lo que me suele gustar a mí... pero buena compra. ¡Por este precio, es un buen libro a tener en vuestras bibliotecas!

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