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Authors
Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)
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O’Connor’s novels and stories (edited by Sally Fitzgerald) are a volume in the Library of America series (1988). Her novels are Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960). Two collections of stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965), are included with earlier uncollected stories in Complete Stories (1971). Her letters are collected in The Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O’Connor (1979). The Presence of Grace, and Other Book Reviews (1983) collects some of her critical prose, as does Mystery and Manners (1969), edited by Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald. Jean W. Cash provides a biography in Flannery O’Connor: A Life (2003). Studies of O’Connor’s fiction include Jon Lance Bacon’s Flannery O’Connor and Cold War Culture (1993), Lorine M. Gertz’s Flannery O’Connor, Literary Theologian (2000), Richard Giannone’s Flannery O’Connor, Hermit Novelist (2000), Sarah Gordon’s Flannery O’Connor: The Obedient Imagination (2000), and Flannery O’Connor’s Radical Reality (2006), edited by Jan Nordby Grettund and Karl-Heinz Westarp. Flannery O’Connor: A Descriptive Bibliography (1981) was compiled by David Farmer.
Flannery O'Connor spent most of her life living with her mother in Milledgeville, Georgia. A masterful short-story writer, O'Connor's dark humor made memorable such titles as Good Country People, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Revelation, and A Good Man Is Hard to Find. Her narrative style is marked by keen skills of observation--her rural southern characters come alive on the page through their gestures and speech, rather than through overt descriptions. Before her fortieth birthday, O'Connor died of disseminated lupus, a rare, incurable disease which had killed her father years before. O'Connor remains one of the most acclaimed short-story writers of the twentieth century.
Questions for Discussion and Writing
Conversations about O'Connor's fiction tend to raise the same issues repeatedly: her lifelong commitment to Roman Catholicism; her chronic and debilitating illness; the advantages and drawbacks of labeling her a regionalist, or a latter-day naturalistic author, or a master of the gothic and the grotesque. Good Country People (1955) allows us to test the usefulness, to literary criticism, of these ways of thinking about O'Connor.
1. Good Country People begins with several long paragraphs, but the narrative which follows turns out to be mostly dialogue. Why begin in this way? Through whose eyes do we see Mrs. Freeman? Mrs. Hopewell? What do you assume to be the narrator's attitude toward these characters?
2. Is Hulga regarded with sympathy? By whom? Is there a difference between the way that other characters see her and the way that we, as readers, are eventually induced to see her? When she is abused and robbed of her leg in the barn by "Pointer," is the scene comic? Where do we find the cues to see her and her predicament as we do?
3. The story ends with Mrs. Freeman and Mrs. Hopewell making condescending remarks about the "simplicity" of others. Are they right about the "nice dull young man"? Are they right about themselves? Why does O'Connor give these two women the job of offering the final comments in this story?
