40 Fun Facts About A Good Man is Hard to Find

In A Good Man Is Hard to Find, why does the grandmother dress up for the long drive?

To die looking like a lady is the point: in a hat, white cuffs and a spray of cloth violets, anyone finding her on the highway would know her class at once.

In A Good Man Is Hard to Find, what makes the grandmother's son crash on a dirt road?

The cat leaps on him after the grandmother, jolted by a sudden embarrassing thought, upsets the luggage hiding the animal she smuggled along.

In A Good Man Is Hard to Find, the Misfit's big black car is compared to which kind of vehicle?

A hearse is the story's plainest omen: the battered car crests the hill minutes after the crash and stops above the family with three armed men inside.

Just before the Misfit shoots her in A Good Man Is Hard to Find, what does the grandmother call him?

Her own child is how she suddenly sees the killer, and she reaches out to touch him. He springs back and fires three times into her chest.

Where is the family in A Good Man Is Hard to Find driving on vacation when they meet the Misfit?

Florida is also where an escaped killer is said to be heading, which the grandmother uses as her best argument for going somewhere else.

Which roadside barbecue owner speaks the title phrase aloud in A Good Man Is Hard to Find?

Red Sammy Butts says it while agreeing with the grandmother that nobody can be trusted any more. She has just praised him for selling two strangers gas on credit.

Why does the escaped killer in A Good Man Is Hard to Find call himself the Misfit?

His punishment exceeds his crime, by his own reckoning: he cannot square what he did wrong with what he has suffered, so he now signs everything and keeps a copy.

How does the grandmother first learn that the Misfit has escaped in A Good Man Is Hard to Find?

A newspaper article about the escape is what she rattles at her son on the opening page, hoping the scare will change the family's vacation plans.

Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard to Find, with its roadside massacre, is a landmark of which genre?

Southern Gothic uses grotesque, violent events to probe life in the American South, and the label was at its height from the 1940s to the 1960s, O'Connor's working years.

In A Good Man Is Hard to Find, which made-up feature of the plantation house excites the grandchildren?

A secret panel hiding the family silver is her lie to force a detour, and it works: the two older grandchildren scream and kick until the car is turned around.

In A Good Man Is Hard to Find, where does the grandmother realize the old plantation house really stands?

Tennessee is hundreds of miles from the dirt road she has talked her son onto, and it is also where she wanted the vacation to be all along.

What is the grandmother's pet, the only survivor of the trip in A Good Man Is Hard to Find, called?

Pitty Sing ends the story in the Misfit's arms. The grandmother hid the animal in a basket, against her son's wishes, fearing it would miss her too much.

In A Good Man Is Hard to Find, where do the Misfit's two henchmen take the family to be shot?

Into the woods go the grandmother's son and his boy first, then the mother, the girl and the baby, while she hears the pistol shots from the ditch.

In A Good Man Is Hard to Find, whom does the Misfit accuse of upsetting the balance of the world?

Jesus is the Misfit's obsession: raising the dead, he says, upset everything, and because he was not there to see it he cannot know it happened.

In A Good Man Is Hard to Find, which offense did a prison doctor tell the Misfit he had committed?

Killing his father is the charge he was told about, but the Misfit insists he remembers the old man dying of the flu, and says he was never shown the papers.

In A Good Man Is Hard to Find, which company's stock made the grandmother's old suitor a rich man?

Coca-Cola shares, bought when the drink first came out, are why she tells her grandchildren she would have done well to marry Mr. Teagarden.

In A Good Man Is Hard to Find, which fruit did the grandmother's suitor carve his initials into?

A watermelon arrived each week with the letters E.A.T. cut into the rind, the initials of Edgar Atkins Teagarden. One Saturday it never reached her.

Which animal is chained to a tree outside the barbecue stop in A Good Man Is Hard to Find?

A monkey scurries up the tree as the family drives in. Like the billboards along the highway, it is one more gimmick to pull customers off the road.

In A Good Man Is Hard to Find, what does the Misfit calmly do right after shooting the grandmother?

He simply cleans his glasses: the gun goes down on the ground, he wipes the lenses, and he tells his two men to put her body with the others.

Which henchman in A Good Man Is Hard to Find is rebuked by the Misfit for calling the killings fun?

Bobby Lee, the fat young gunman, treats the murders as sport. The Misfit's sharp answer to him is the last line of the story.

Which grandchild in A Good Man Is Hard to Find says the fat henchman reminds her of a pig?

June Star, sharp-tongued throughout, has already insulted the barbecue stop to its owner's wife, who had only asked whether she would like to be her little girl.

What is the name of the grandmother's rude eight-year-old grandson in A Good Man Is Hard to Find?

John Wesley shares his name with the founder of Methodism, a pointed choice for a boy with no manners. He is one of the first two led away to be shot.

In A Good Man Is Hard to Find, which birds decorate the yellow shirt the Misfit takes from a dead man?

Parrots, bright blue ones, cover the sport shirt the grandmother's son wore on the drive. The henchmen carry it back, and the Misfit pulls it on while she watches.

Which of these jobs does the Misfit tell the grandmother he once held in A Good Man Is Hard to Find?

Gospel singer is the first trade he lists, followed by soldier, undertaker, railroad hand and farmer. He adds that he has been married twice and caught in a tornado.

In A Good Man Is Hard to Find, whom does the grandmother blame for the decline she sees everywhere?

Europe, she tells the barbecue owner, treats America as a bottomless purse. He tells her she is quite right, which caps their long talk about how much better times used to be.

In A Good Man Is Hard to Find, which injury does the mother suffer when she is thrown from the car?

A broken shoulder and a gash on her face are her injuries, and she sits in the ditch holding the baby while her two older children shriek with delight at having had an accident.

In A Good Man Is Hard to Find, what does the grandmother write down as the family leaves home?

The car's mileage goes in her notes because she thinks it will be fun to say how far they have been when they get back. They never do.

Which famous title does the grandmother turn into a plantation pun in A Good Man Is Hard to Find?

Gone with the Wind is her joke about where the plantation went, made as the car passes an old graveyard that once belonged to it.

From which point of view is A Good Man Is Hard to Find told, staying mostly close to the grandmother?

Third person narration keeps her at the center without ever giving her a name, and it stays behind with her in the ditch while the others are led away.

In A Good Man Is Hard to Find, which Georgia city does the family leave at the start of the trip?

Atlanta is home, and the car has barely cleared its outskirts before the grandmother starts pointing out scenery and warning her son about the speed limit.

Flannery O'Connor borrowed the title A Good Man Is Hard to Find from which kind of earlier work?

A blues song by Eddie Green, first published in 1917, gave the story its name. Bessie Smith was among the singers who recorded it in the 1920s.

Flannery O'Connor described her 1955 collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find as stories about which Christian doctrine?

Original sin was the subject Flannery O'Connor claimed for the book: she called it nine stories on the theme, although the finished collection holds ten.

What did Flannery O'Connor say the grandmother's final touch offers the Misfit in A Good Man Is Hard to Find?

Divine grace is what O'Connor said the old woman's gesture offers the killer, and it unsettles him: he springs back and answers it with bullets.

Which disease killed Flannery O'Connor, author of A Good Man Is Hard to Find, at the age of thirty-nine?

Lupus had already taken one of her parents when she was fifteen, and it forced her home to a Georgia farm, where she wrote this story and most of her fiction.

Which birds did Flannery O'Connor famously raise on the farm where she wrote A Good Man Is Hard to Find?

Peacocks roamed her Georgia farm, and she wrote an essay about them titled The King of the Birds. They strut through her fiction too.

Which indie folk musician sang A Good Man Is Hard to Find from the Misfit's viewpoint on a 2004 album?

Sufjan Stevens put the track on Seven Swans, an acoustic album steeped in Bible stories, and wrote it in the killer's own voice.

Flannery O'Connor wrote A Good Man Is Hard to Find as a devout member of which church?

Catholic belief shaped everything she wrote, yet her characters are nearly all Bible Belt Protestants, whose fierce search for truth she said she admired.

Which roadside creature appears in the Saint Cyril epigraph to A Good Man Is Hard to Find?

A dragon waits beside the road in the passage, ready to devour those who pass. O'Connor also used the lines to close her 1957 essay The Fiction Writer and His Country.

In A Good Man Is Hard to Find, the barbecue stop sits outside which town, named like a New Testament epistle?

Timothy appears to be O'Connor's invention, and critics read it as a nod to Paul's letters to a young disciple, which praise the faith of his mother and grandmother.

What is the name of the roadside barbecue place where the family stops in A Good Man Is Hard to Find?

The Tower is a filling station and dance hall as well as a lunch stop, advertised for miles by highway signs that also boast its owner is a veteran.