A Good Man Is Hard to Find
Assigned by 1 of the 9 reading lists, catalogue entry only
- Written
- 1953, collected 1955
- Form
- Novel
- Language
- English
- Length
- Short · 30 ppunder 120 pages
- Difficulty
- Moderate2 of 5 for a first-year reader
We recommendThe Complete StoriesFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971Contains every story, including The Enduring Chill, which the Thomas Aquinas College seminar pairs with it.
These links go straight to Amazon and Bookshop.org and earn this site nothing today. Prices are the same either way. How this works.
A short story first published in 1953 and the title piece of O'Connor's first collection. A Georgia family sets out on a car trip to Florida, over the objections of the grandmother, who would rather visit relatives in Tennessee and who has read that an escaped killer called The Misfit is loose. Her insistence on seeing a plantation house she remembers leads them down a dirt road, into a ditch, and into the hands of The Misfit and his men. As her family is taken into the woods and shot, the grandmother talks with the killer about Jesus and, at the last moment, reaches out to him.
No reading guide yet
The catalogue entry above is complete: the dates, the form, the themes and every program that assigns A Good Man Is Hard to Find are verified against each program's published list.
What is missing is the part that takes real work: the summary, the key passages, and a recommended translation. The edition named below is the one most programs assign, so the buy links are useful already.



