A Good Man Is Hard to Find (short story)

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"A Good Man Is Hard to Find"
Author Flannery O'Connor
Country United States
Language English
Genre(s) Short story, Southern Gothic
Publication type Collection
Media type Print
Publication date 1955



The story was first published in 1953 in the anthology The Avon Book of Modern Writing.[1] In 1960, it was collected in the anthology The House of Fiction, published by Charles Scribner's Sons. "A Good Man Is Hard To Find," because of its publication in many anthologies, became the most well known of O'Connor's works.[2]

Plot summary[edit]

A man named Bailey intends to take his family from Georgia to Florida for a summer vacation, but his mother, (referred to as "the grandmother" in the story) wants him to drive to Tennessee. She argues that his children, June Star and John Wesley, have never been to Tennessee and shows him a news article about an escaped murderer called The Misfit last seen heading to Florida. The next day, Bailey takes his family to Florida anyway. The grandmother wakes up early to hide her cat, Pitty Sing, in a basket on the floor in the back of the car. (She is worried that the cat would die while they were gone.) Bailey finds her sitting in the car, dressed in her best clothes and an ostentatious hat; she says that if she should die in an accident along the road, she wants people to see her corpse and know she was refined and "a lady." The Grandmother talks continuously during the trip, trying to engage her two grandchildren in games and telling them jokes and a story, all of which they ignore with disdain. She recalls her youth in the Old South. She reminisces about how much better everything was in her time, when children were respectful and people "did right then." When the family stops at an old diner for lunch, she talks to the owner, Red Sammy, about The Misfit. He and the grandmother agree that things were much better in the past, that the world at present is degenerate, and she agrees with Sammy's remark that "a good man is hard to find."

After the family returns to the road, the grandmother begins telling the children a story about a mysterious house nearby with secret passages, a house she remembers from her childhood. This catches the children's attention and they want to visit the house, so they harass their father until he reluctantly goes through with it to let them take a side trip. As he drives them down a remote dirt road, the grandmother suddenly realizes that the house she was thinking of was actually in Tennessee, not Georgia. That shocking realization makes her involuntarily kick her feet which frightens the cat, causing it to spring from its hidden basket, onto Bailey's neck. He then loses control of the car and flips it over to end up in a ditch below the road. Only the children's mother is injured, the children are frantic with excitement, and the grandmother's main concern is dealing with Bailey's anger.

The family waits for help. When she notices a car coming down the road, the grandmother flags it down until it stops. Three men come out and begin to talk to her. All three have guns. The grandmother says that she recognizes the leader, the man in glasses, as The Misfit. The Misfit confirms this, saying it would have been better for them all if she hadn't recognized him, and Bailey curses his mother. The Misfit has his two men take Bailey and John Wesley into the woods, claiming that "the boys want to ask you something." After they leave, the grandmother speaks to The Misfit who says he's been falsely imprisoned for killing his father, when his cause of death was actually a flu epidemic. The Misfit mentions talking to a psychiatrist while in prison about why he did not remember what crime he had committed.

The men shoot Bailey and John in the forest, then come back to take the children's mother, the baby, and June Star for the same purpose. The grandmother begins pleading for her own life. When The Misfit talks to her about Jesus, he expresses his doubts about His raising Lazarus from the dead. As he speaks, the Misfit becomes agitated and angry. He snarls into the grandmother's face and claims that life has "no pleasure but meanness". In her growing confusion, she thinks that The Misfit is going to cry, so she reaches out and touches his shoulder tenderly, saying "You’re one of my own children!" His reaction is to jump away "as if a snake had bitten him" and he kills her with three shots.

When they finish murdering the family, The Misfit takes a moment to clean his glasses, saying that the grandmother would have been a good woman if "it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." The story ends with the Misfit chastising one of his sidekicks for claiming that the family's murder was good fun. The Misfit tells him to shut up, that "it's no real pleasure in life." [3]


Atlanta resident with a wife and three children and his mother. He crashes their car on a family trip to Florida when he gives in to the children's wishes to visit an old plantation.
Bailey’s wife
John Wesley, June Star
Bailey’s children.
The Baby
Red Sammy Butts
Restaurant operator who agrees with Bailey’s mother that the world is in a state of decline.
Red Sammy’s Wife
The Misfit
Escaped prisoner who comes across Bailey's family after they have crashed.
Hiram, Bobby Lee
Prisoners who escaped with The Misfit.
Edgar Atkins Teagarden
Pitty Sing
Pet cat of Bailey’s mother no one knows what happened to her ("Pitty Sing" is a character in the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, The Mikado).
Gray Monkey







Theme of grace[edit]





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[11] but the film does not depict the story or its characters well according to most reviewers.[citation needed]




  1. ^ Gooch, Brad. Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor. New York: Little, Brown, 2009, p. 238.
  2. ^ Ann Kirk, Connie (2008). Critical companion to Katelyn Smith. Infobase Publishing. pp. 74–78. Retrieved April 24, 2011. 
  3. ^ http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~surette/goodman.html
  4. ^ Desmond, John (2004), Flannery O'Connor's Misfit and the Mystery of Evil, Renascence, pp. 129–138 
  5. ^ Ochshorn, Kathleen (1990), A Cloak of Grace: Contradictions in "A Good Man is Hard to Find", Studies in American Fiction, pp. 113–117 
  6. ^ Asals, Frederick. "The Limits of Explanation." Critical Essays on Flannery O'Connor. Melvin J. Friedman and Beverly Lyon Clark, eds. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1985, p. 52.
  7. ^ Bandy, Stephen (1996), 'One of my Babies': The Misfit and the Grandmother, Studies in Short Fiction, pp. 107–117 
  8. ^ “Means, Meaning and Mediated Space in ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find.’” The Southern Quarterly. 44.4 (2007): 125-38.
  9. ^ Wood, Ralph C. Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South. Grand Rapids, Mi.: Eerdman's Publishing, 2005, p. 41-42.
  10. ^ O'Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970, p. 112.
  11. ^ http://www.ubu.com/film/rossi.html

Further reading[edit]

  • Flannery O'Connor (1993). Frederick Asals, ed. A good man is hard to find. Rutgers University Press. ISBN 978-0-8135-1977-7.  Contains the original text as well as a collection of critical essays on it.
  • Jan Nordby Gretlund, Karl-Heinz Westarp, ed. (2006). Flannery O'Connor's radical reality. Univ of South Carolina Press. ISBN 978-1-57003-601-9.  Several essays discuss the story in the context of Flannery's work as whole.
  • George Kilcourse (2001). Flannery O'Connor's religious imagination: a world with everything off balance. Paulist Press. ISBN 978-0-8091-4005-3.  Focuses on the religious aspects of Flannery's writings, including those in this short story.

External links[edit]