In your discussion consider what O’Connor adds to this discussion that is new or different.

Read the short story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” several times. This story appeared in a short story collection with the same title in 1955. Once asked by a student to explain this story, Flannery O’Connor said that ” A story really isn’t any good unless it successfully resists paraphrase, unless it hangs on and expands in the mind.” O’Connor, writing in the late 1940s and early 1950s, is raising the same questions about good and evil that we have already seen raised in Ecclesiastes and in Tolstoy, but now this question is raised in the aftermath of two world wars, the second of which produced the Holocaust and was ended by dropping atomic bombs on 100s of thousands of innocent people. The question is expanded to include all of humanity because now humans have the ability to erase themselves from the universe.

In your discussion consider what O’Connor adds to this discussion that is new or different. Consider that she is writing to a culture that is beginning to lose its trust in long held beliefs and trusted institutions. What “truth” does it hold for our current culture?

Again, much has been written about this story. Read some of the articles and include insights in your analysis.