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    A Study Guide for Flannery O'Conner's Good Country People
    A Study Guide for Flannery O'Conner's Good Country People
    A Study Guide for Flannery O'Conner's Good Country People
    Ebook45 pages34 minutes

    A Study Guide for Flannery O'Conner's Good Country People

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Flannery O'C "onner's Good Country People," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 21, 2015
    ISBN9781535824026
    A Study Guide for Flannery O'Conner's Good Country People

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Flannery O'Conner's Good Country People - Gale

      11

      Good Country People

      Flannery O'Connor

      1955

      Introduction

      Flannery O'Connor's Good Country People is one of the most widely anthologized short stories in the American canon, even after more than fifty years since its first publication. Initially included in the 1955 collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find, the story was republished in 1971 in the posthumously published The Complete Stories. The latter compilation won the 1972 National Book Award for Fiction.

      O'Connor herself considered Good Country People to be one of her finest short stories. Richard Giannone, in Flannery O'Connor and the Mystery of Love, reports that in a letter to Robert Giroux, her editor, she wrote that Good Country People would anchor the rest of the stories included in A Good Man Is Hard to Find, as it was a very hot story that would set the whole collection on its feet.

      The story contains all the hallmarks of classic O'Connor fiction. Set in the American South, Good Country People explores themes of faith, good and evil, and grace through irony and symbolism using a gothic style that O'Connor preferred to think of as grotesqueness. Her stories, including Good Country People, were typically humorous, although hers was a dark humor commonly lost on the average reader, who could not always see through the violence wrought by corrupt characters to O'Connor's moral messages. As quoted by J. B. Cheaney in Radical Orthodoxy: The Fiction of Flannery O'Connor, Giroux once explained that her critics often recognized her power but missed her point.

      Author Biography

      Born on March 25, 1925, Mary Flannery O'Connor was the only child of Edward O'Connor, Jr., and his wife, Regina Cline. The couple doted on their daughter and raised her in a devoutly Catholic home in Georgia. When she was twelve years old, O'Connor and her family moved to Atlanta, but within months, she and her mother returned to their home in Milledgeville. Edward was diagnosed with lupus, a disorder that causes the immune system to attack healthy cells and tissues, and died just weeks before his daughter's sixteenth birthday in 1941.

      That same year, O'Connor graduated from high school and enrolled at Georgia State College for Women, where she served as art editor for her school's newspaper and edited the campus literary magazine. O'Connor graduated with a degree in social science in 1945. That was the year she dropped her first name and applied to the University of Iowa's graduate journalism program, where she was accepted into the Writers' Workshop master of fine arts program.

      O'Connor sold her first short story, The Geranium, to Accent magazine and subsequently won the Rinehart-Iowa Fiction Award. She left Iowa in 1947 with her degree and headed to Sarasota Springs, New York, where she worked on her first novel, Wise Blood. During this time, she met Robert Giroux, who would one day become her editor, and the translator

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