A Good Man Is Hard to FindBy Flannery O'ConnorBiography: Flannery O'Connor was born on March 25, 1925, in Savannah, Georgia, the only child of Edward F. O'Connor. When O'Connor was six, she experienced her first brush with celebrity status. O'Connor attended the Peabody Laboratory School, from which she graduated in 1942. And the interesting thing is she never married. O'Connor completed more than two dozen short stories and two novels. She died on August 3, 1964, at the age of 39.Bailey intends to take his family from Georgia to Florida for a summer vacation, but his mother, wants him to drive to Tennessee. She argues that his children, June Star and John Wesley, have never been to Tennessee and shows him a news article about an escaped murderer called The Misfit last seen heading to Florida. The next day, Bailey takes his family to Florida anyway. The grandmother wakes up early to hide her cat, Pitty Sing, in a basket on the floor in the back of the car. Bailey finds her sitting in the car, dressed in her best clothes and an ostentatious hat; she says that if she should die in an accident along the road, she wants people to see her corpse and know she was refined and "a lady." The Grandmother talks continuously during the trip, trying to engage her two grandchildren in games and telling them jokes and a story, all of which they ignore with disdain. She recalls her youth in the Old South. She reminisces about how much better everything was in her time, when children were respectful and people did right then. When the family stops for lunch, she talks to the owner, Red Sammy, about The Misfit. He and the grandmother agree that things were much better in the past, that the world at present is degenerate, and she agrees with Sammy's remark that "a good man is hard to find."After the family returns to the road, the grandmother begins telling the children a story about a mysterious house nearby with secret passages, a house she remembers from her childhood. This catches the children's attention and they want to visit the house, so they harass their father until he reluctantly agrees to let them take a side trip. As he drives them down the road, the grandmother suddenly realizes that the house she was thinking of was actually in Tennessee, not Georgia. That shocking realization makes her involuntarily kick her feet which frightens the cat, causing it to spring from its hidden basket, onto Bailey's neck. He then loses control of the car and flips it over to end up in a ditch below the road. Only the children's mother is injured, the children are frantic with excitement, and the grandmother's...
