Mary Flannery O'Connor was born in 1925 in Savannah Georgia, but grew up in Milledgeville, Georgia. She went to parochial schools and was raised a devout Catholic, then furthered her education by earning an M.F.A. at the School for Writers at the University of Iowa, in 1946. Although she dwelt briefly in an artists colony in Saratoga Springs, New York and later in New York City, she spent most of her life in Milledgeville, Georgia. When O'Connor was 25 years old, she discovered she had lupus erythematosus, the same autoimmune disease that had crippled and killed her father ten years before. Both her life threatening illness and her Christian belief greatly influenced her attitude toward life and was demonstrated in her writing (class text, p. 1228). She summarized this relationship once, "I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in relation to that" (p. 1229). Many who have studied her works have struggled to find the redemption that she claims. For example, Bandy finds that the message in "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" is more pessimistic and subversive of the doctrine of grace and charity than anything else (1996). O'Connor, however, would have debated that the tenderness, grace, and charity of the liberal reformer was "mawkish, theoretical, and corrupt" (Milder, 1975, p. 802) and represented everything wrong with modern religion. It could be said that the nature of her Catholicism was Calvinistic.
"A Good Man Is Hard To Find" (1971) is an example of this belief and the relationship she felt man had with God, and is in fact a type of allegory in one way as this family and the Misfit are both used to portray what happens when someone strays from the path. In fact, Fike argues that this story is based on the books of I and II Timothy in the New Testament (2000). These two books discuss the relation...