SOURCE: "Christian Realism and O'Connor's 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find'," in American Fiction in the Cold War, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1991, pp. 125-36.

Schaub is an American educator and critic. In the following excerpt, he examines "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" in the context of the revisionary liberalism of the 1950s.

The idea of "the South" and of "southern writing" also helps to situate O'Connor's [A Good Man Is Hard to Find], for during the fifties specific political and cultural meanings were attributed to the southern experience. When Walker Percy won the National Book Award in 1961 for The Moviegoer, he was asked why the South was contributing so many fine writers. He answered, "Because we lost the War." O'Connor gave her interpretation of Percy's meaning in an essay she contributed to Esprit: "He didn't mean by that simply that a lost war makes...