A good man is hard to find

First published in 1955, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories established Flannery O'Connor as one of the fiercest and strangest voices in American letters. Across ten stories set in the mid-century rural South, ordinary people — smug grandmothers, self-satisfied intellectuals, con men, and children — are stripped of their illusions in moments of sudden, often violent grace.

In the unforgettable title story, a family road trip to Florida ends in a chance meeting with an escaped killer who calls himself the Misfit, and a grandmother's genteel certainties collapse in an instant. Elsewhere a one-armed drifter marries for a car, a traveling Bible salesman reveals his true trade, and displaced persons expose the cruelty simmering beneath Southern gentility. O'Connor described the collection, with characteristic dark humor, as "nine stories about original sin."

Savage, funny, and shot through with theological force, these are among the most anthologized and influential short stories in the American canon.