Flannery O'Connor Reads "A Good Man Is Hard To Find"

Vanderbilt University - April 1959, Miss Flannery O'Connor reads her short story, "A Good Man Is Hard To Find":

There was a piercing scream from the woods, followed closely by a pistol report. "Does it seem right to you, lady, that one is punished a heap and another ain't punished at all?" 

"Jesus!" the old lady cried. "You've got good blood! I know you wouldn't shoot a lady! I know you come from nice people! Pray! Jesus, you ought not to shoot a lady. I'll give you all the money I've got! 

"Lady," The Misfit said, looking beyond her far into the woods, "there never was a body that give the undertaker a tip." 

There were two more pistol reports and the grandmother raised her head like a parched old turkey hen crying for water and called, "Bailey Boy, Bailey Boy!" as if her heart would break. 

"Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead," The Misfit continued, "and He shouldn't have done it. He shown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it's nothing for you to do but thow away everything and follow Him, and if He didn't, then it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness," he said and his voice had become almost a snarl.

Vivian and I sitting on Flannery O'Connor's porch in Georgia. (February 2011)

What a writer; what a lady.