"A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is a Southern gothic short story first published in 1953 by author Flannery O'Connor who, in her own words, described it as "the story of a family of six which, on its way driving to Florida [from Georgia], is slaughtered by an escaped convict who calls himself the Misfit".^[2]

This article contains too many or overly lengthy quotations. (November 2021)

Quick Facts Country, Language ...

"A Good Man Is Hard to Find"
Short story by Flannery O'Connor
The work's title was taken from the 1917 Eddie Green song that includes the lines "A good man is hard to find / You always get the other kind".[1] (1918 sheet music cover.)
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Southern Gothic, short story, dialogue
Publication
Published in	Modern Writing I
Publication type	Short story collection
Publisher	Avon
Media type	Print
Publication date	1953

Close

The story remains the most anthologized and most well-known of all of O'Connor's works.^[3]

"A Good Man Is Hard to Find" was first published in 1953 in the multi-author short-story anthology Modern Writing I published by Avon.^[4][5] The story appears in her own collection of short stories A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories published in 1955 by Harcourt.^[6] In 1960, it was included in the anthology The House of Fiction, published by Charles Scribner's Sons, and later included in numerous other short-story collections.

Bailey, the head of an Atlanta household, prepares to take his family on a vacation to Florida. Bailey's mother (known only as "the grandmother" throughout the story) wants to go to East Tennessee instead, and warns Bailey that a convict called The Misfit has escaped from prison and is heading towards Florida. The family, including Bailey, her grandson John Wesley, her granddaughter June Star, and her infant grandchild, tended to by her daughter-in-law, ignore her. When they leave the next morning, the grandmother occupies the backseat of the family's car, dressed finely so that if she is killed in an accident, she can be recognized as a Southern lady. She hides the family's cat, Pitty Sing, in a basket between her legs, not wanting to leave it home alone.

While traveling, the grandmother points out scenery in Georgia. Her grandchildren respond by berating both Georgia and Tennessee, and the grandmother reminds them that in her day, children were more respectful. She delights in seeing a naked black child waving from a shack, finding the image quaint. She sees a graveyard which was once part of a cotton plantation that she jokingly says has "Gone with the Wind". She tells her grandchildren that when she was young she was courted by a man who, as an early owner of Coca-Cola stock, died wealthy.

The family stops for barbeque at the Tower Restaurant after passing a series of billboards proclaiming the restaurant and food as "famous" and the proprietor, Red Sammy Butts, as "the fat boy with the happy laugh". On arrival, the family finds that the place is somewhat run down. Red Sammy charms the grandmother but is rather scornful of his own wife, a mistrustful waitress who worries about being robbed by The Misfit. The grandmother promptly declares Red Sammy "a good man", and the two reminisce about better times while lamenting the decay of values.

Later that afternoon, the family continues their trip before the grandmother falsely remembers a plantation being in the area, only realizing her mistake after persuading Bailey to turn down a rocky dirt road surrounded by wilderness. The pang of this error causes her to disturb the cat, who leaps onto Bailey, who loses control of the car, and the automobile flips into a ditch. No one is seriously hurt but the accident is witnessed by a party of three strange men, one of whom the grandmother recognizes as The Misfit. She announces this and The Misfit has his men lead Bailey, the children's mother, and the children off into the woods where they are shot and killed. The grandmother confusedly pleads for her life, beseeching The Misfit to find solace by praying, but The Misfit is uncertain if Jesus Christ's power was real and unclear about his own purpose.

Finally upon seeing The Misfit's despair, the grandmother reaches out, takes him by the shoulder, and gently tells him that he is "one of her babies". At that moment The Misfit shoots her to death. When his companions return, The Misfit says that the grandmother "would've been a good woman if it were someone there to shoot her every minute of her life", and seems to conclude that violence affords "no real pleasure in life".

• The Grandmother, the protagonist of the story: a woman who seems content living with her son Bailey, her daughter-in-law and her grandchildren. She takes great pride in being "a lady". The narrator refers to her as "grandmother" when at least one grandchild is alive, "old lady" when her grandchildren are dead, and a "young lady" as she recalls a plantation home near her native Tennessee home. The central conflict of the story is between the grandmother and The Misfit, her killer, in a dialogue that occurs while Bailey, his wife and children are shot in the woods not far from the two characters.
• The Misfit: an escaped convict on the run with two other criminals. He's mentioned in the first paragraph of the story, and finally appears at the end of it. Although he is polite to The Grandmother and her family, he directs his henchmen to kill the family and then shoots and kills The Grandmother himself.
• Bailey: The Grandmother's son. Bailey drives the family car on their road trip to Florida, although "trips made him nervous". When The Grandmother reveals that she recognizes The Misfit, Bailey curses at her.
• Bailey's nameless wife: a nearly speechless wife and mother described as a "young woman in slacks, whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage". She is not identified by name, only as "the children's mother". Like her husband, she does little to discipline her children. In the car accident, she is thrown out of the car and breaks her shoulder.
• John Wesley and June Star: Bailey's older children are John Wesley and June Star, aged eight and seven, respectively, two brats – rowdy and disrespectful. Their self-centeredness is so extreme that they are never aware that their mother, thrown out of the moving car during the accident, has a broken shoulder, and seem almost delighted that they got into a car accident, though disappointed that no one was killed in the crash. They have learned to manipulate their parents by screaming and yelling at them, behavior the grandmother has learned to initiate.
• Red Sammy Butts, who initiates a dialogue with the grandmother that Evans characterizes as a "festival of clichés" where "[e]very single one of his opening phrases is a commonplace platitude" that does, however, reveal his character as competitive, suspicious of others, and self-justifying.^[7] The dialogue is between two people who find each other likeable because they enjoy complaining together.
• The wife of the fat owner of The Tower is "a tall burnt-brown woman with hair and eyes lighter than her skin" who works as a waitress. Red Sammy directs his wife as if she were any ordinary waitress, preventing her from engaging in sociable chat with Bailey's family.
• Hiram and Bobby Lee: convicts who escaped prison with The Misfit. The two kill Bailey, his wife and children, and on the murder of the grandmother by The Misfit, Bobby Lee suggests to The Misfit that killing her was enjoyable.

In her essay, "The Nature and Aim of Fiction", O'Connor described her goals for writing fiction. The essay is useful for helping readers understand how to approach and interpret her works. One of her major goals in writing was to construct elements of her fiction so they can be interpreted anagogically – her "anagogical vision":

The kind of vision the fiction writer needs to have, or to develop, in order to increase the meaning of his story is called anagogical vision, and that is the kind of vision that is able to see different levels of reality in one image or one situation. The medieval commentators on Scripture found three kinds of meaning in the literal level of the sacred text: one they called allegorical, in which one fact pointed to another; one they called tropological, or moral, which had to do with what should be done; and one they called anagogical, which had to do with the Divine life and our participation in it. Although this was a method applied to exegesis, it was also an attitude toward all of creation, and a way of reading nature... .^[18]

Peter M. Candler, Jr., summarized O'Connor's vision for readers – that all of the interpretations of her work are rooted in its literal sense: "...[F]or O'Connor, the literal in some sense already 'contains' the figurative. Far from being a level of meaning superadded to the literal sense, the 'spiritual sense' is already inherent in any attempt to render something artistically. 'A good story,' she wrote, 'is literal in the same sense a child's drawing is literal.'"^[19] In other words, O'Connor understood that her anagogical vision is a challenge to readers because they must not only understand the literal story but also associate the literal with their knowledge or experience. Consequently, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is enriched beyond its literal narrative when the literal can be related to biblical, Christian, Roman Catholic, Protestant, Southern society and its history, and other subjects.

The literal sense of the story's title and The Misfit's complaint, "If He [Jesus] did what He said, then it's nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him" both appear in a more constructive context in the New Testament story of Jesus and the Rich Young Man, suggesting that searches for the deeper meanings of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" might start there. At readings O'Connor offered suggestions about her intent at the literal level, such as for a 1963 reading at a Southern college with a highly respected creative writing program – Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia:

I don't have any pretensions to being an Aeschylus or Sophocles and providing you in this story with a cathartic experience out of your mythic background, though this story I'm going to read certainly calls up a good deal of the South's mythic background, and it should elicit from you a degree of pity and terror, even though its way of being serious is a comic one. I do think, though, that like the Greeks you should know what is going to happen in this story so that any element of suspense in it will be transferred from its surface to its interior.^[20]

A film adaptation of the short story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find", entitled Black Hearts Bleed Red, was made in 1992 by New York filmmaker Jeri Cain Rossi. The film stars noted New York artist Joe Coleman,^[27] but according to reviewers the film does not depict the story well.^{[citation needed]}

The American folk musician Sufjan Stevens adapted the story into a song going by the same title. It appears on his 2004 album Seven Swans. The song is written in the first person from the point of view of The Misfit.

In May 2017, Deadline Hollywood reported that director John McNaughton would make a feature film adaptation of the story starring Michael Rooker, from a screenplay by Benedict Fitzgerald.^[28]

In June 2021, death metal band Counterattack released a song on their debut album, World Erased, titled "Good Man" based on the short story.

Baltimore, Maryland band June Star was started up by high school English teacher Andrew Grimm in 1998. For twenty years they have been releasing records using the name of Bailey's child June Star.^[29]

• Ecclesiastes
• Methodism
• "On Slide Inn Road"
• Particular judgment
• Sheol