SOURCE: "Advertisements for Grace: Flannery O'Connor's 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find'," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. IV, No. 1, Fall, 1966, pp. 19-37.

In the following essay, Marks analyzes "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" as religious allegory.

As a narrative stylist, Flannery O'Connor belongs, however peripherally, to a Pauline or Augustinian tradition extending from Langland to Bunyan and Hawthorne. Her tastes for gothicism, allegory, and regional setting derive from that special admiration for The House of the Seven Gables evident in so many important Southern writers from Faulkner to Truman Capote. The mingled scorn and sorrow with which Hawthorne faced the decline of New England, his ambivalent attitude towards Puritanism, and his dubious hopefulness about America's spiritual future find echoes throughout Miss O'Connor's stories of Evangelical awakening amid the scattered ashes of plantation Georgia. In "The Fiction Writer and Her Country," she makes this statement...