In a rare audio recording, Flannery O'Connor reads her brilliant short story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find." Mike Spring at Open Culture provides background:
In April of 1959–five years before her death at the age of 39 from lupus–O’Connor ventured away from her secluded family farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, to give a reading at Vanderbilt University. She read one of her most famous and unsettling stories, “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” The audio, accessible above, is one of two known recordings of the author reading that story. (The other, from a 1957 appearance at Notre Dame University, can be heard here.) In her distinctive Georgian drawl, O’Connor tells the story of a fateful family trip…
I remember when I first read that story. It took me a couple of hours to recover.
(Hat tip: The Paris Review. Image: "Self-Portrait" by Flannery O'Connor, via Melville House)
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