2011 Student Writing Awards Booklet - Santa Fe Community College

would not strive towards the straight and narrow if faced with impending
death O’Connor makes the point that although the grandmother was not
untarnished, she ultimately redeemed herself and achieved a state of grace
at the high cost of her life.
On the surface, one could easily view Flannery O’Connor as simple
and label her as conventional, but a closer look reveals a more complicated
woman. She was a devout Roman Catholic in a time when many of
her contemporaries were anything but Christian. She maintained a keen
and often witty understanding of the world and herself up until her
untimely death; Above all she remains a tremendous and unclassifiable
writer as shown in her powerful work “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”
Naturally, no one can give justice to her writing better than she and
O’Connor wrote in one of her many letters:“When you can assume that
your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use
more normal ways of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does
not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock — to the hard
of hearing you shout, and for the blind you draw large and startling figures”
(Walters 32).
Works Cited
Balée, Susan. Flannery O’Connor: Literary Prophet of the South. New York
and Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 1995. Print.
Coles, Robert. Flannery O’Connor’s South. Baton Rouge and London:
Louisiana State University Press, 1980. Print.
Ellsberg, Robert, ed. Flannery O’Connor: Spiritual Writings. New York: Orbis
Books, 2003. Print.
Galloway, Patrick.“The Dark Side of the Cross: Flannery O’Connor’s Short
Fiction.” Books and Blog by Patrick Galloway. 2006.Web. 8 April. 2010.
O’Connor, Flannery.“A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Literature:An Introduction
to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. 6th ed. Kennedy, X.J. and
Dana Gioia. Boston: Longman, 2010. 226-236. Print.
Renner, Stanley.“Secular meaning in ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find.’”
College Literature 9.2 (1982): 123-132. Twentieth-Century Literary
Criticism. Ed. Janet Witalec.Vol. 132. Detroit: Gale, 2003. From
Literature Resource Center.Web. 6 April. 2010.
Walters, Dorothy. Flannery O’Connor. Ed. Sylvia E. Bowman. Boston:Twayne
Publishers, 1973. Print.
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