Originally published in Harper's Bazaar, June 1955. This story is now available in the anthologies A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories, The Dark Descent, and The Dark Descent: The Medusa in the Shield v. 2 Mrs. Hopewell is a country farmer and her estranged daughter Hulga has a degree in philosophy. A stranger arrives and convinces them both that he's a naive Bible salesman. They're wrong and the consequences are particularly humiliating for Hulga, after he makes sexual advances, steals her prosthetic leg, and reveals that that was his aim.
Author
Critics note novels Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960) and short stories, collected in such works as A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955), of American writer Mary Flannery O'Connor for their explorations of religious faith and a spare literary style. The Georgia state college for women educated O’Connor, who then studied writing at the Iowa writers' workshop and wrote much of Wise Blood at the colony of artists at Yaddo in upstate New York. She lived most of her adult life on Andalusia, ancestral farm of her family outside Milledgeville, Georgia. O’Connor wrote Everything That Rises Must Converge (1964). When she died at the age of 39 years, America lost one of its most gifted writers at the height of her powers. Survivors published her essays were published in Mystery and Manners (1969). Her Complete Stories , published posthumously in 1972, won the national book award for that year. Survivors published her letters in The Habit of Being (1979). In 1988, the Library of America published Collected Works of Flannery O'Connor, the first so honored postwar writer. People in an online poll in 2009 voted her Complete Stories as the best book to win the national book award in the six-decade history of the contest.
