A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories

Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find is a collection of 10 short stories, most of them written in the two years following her first novel (Wise Blood). The highlights are “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” (an intense and partly-autobiographical story of a conflicted mother/daughter relationship), “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” (about teenage adolescence and sexuality), “Good Country People” (in my opinion her best story, about the complicated ways religion and morality manifest themselves in flawed humans), and the title story (in which a family road trip is upended by a violent attack). The remaining entries are of somewhat lesser quality, but at their best O’Connor’s stories are masterpieces of the form.