"A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is Flannery O'Connor's most famous and most discussed story. O'Connor herself singled it out by making it the title piece of her first collection and the story she most often chose for readings or talks to students. It is an unforgettable tale, both riveting and comic, of the confrontation of a family with violence and sudden death. More than anything else O'Connor ever wrote, this story mixes the comedy, violence, and religious concerns that characterize her fiction. This casebook for the story includes an introduction by the editor, a chronology of the author's life, the authoritative text of the story itself, comments and letters by O'Connor about the story, critical essays, and a bibliography. The critical essays span more than twenty years of commentary and suggest several approaches to the story - formalistic thematic, deconstructionist - all within the grasp of the undergraduate, while the introduction also points interested students toward still other resources. Useful for both beginning and advanced students, this casebook provides an in-depth introduction to one of America's most gifted modern writers. The contributors are Michael O. Bellamy, Hallman B. Bryant, William S. Doxey, J.Peter Dyson, Madison Jones, W.S. Marks, III, Carter Martin, William J. Scheick, Mary Jane Schenck, and J.O.Tate. Frederick Asals teaches at New College, the University of Toronto. He is the author of Flannery O'Connor: The Imagination of Extremity and of articles on O'Connor and other American writers. A volume in a new series, Women Writers: Text and Contexts, edited by Thomas L. Erskine and Connie L. Richards. Series Board: Martha Banta, Barbara Christian, and Paul Lauter.

This study explores the dualities that inform the entire body of Flannery O'Connor's fiction. From the almost unredeemable world of "Wise Blood" to the climactic moments of revelation that infuse "The Violent Bear It Away" and "Everything That Rises Must Converge," O'Connor's novels and stories wrestle with extremes of faith and reason, acceptance and revolt; they arch between cool narrative and explosive action, between a sacramental vision and a primary intuition of reality.

Ten years in the making, Under the Volcano is the best-known work of writer Malcolm Lowry. Published first in 1947, it is a brilliant, moving, and complex novel, perhaps the last fictional masterpiece to emerge from the modernist movement. As the years went by, Lowry's obsessive rewriting took him further and further into his book, which changed relatively little in the outer semblance of action and main characters but became utterly transformed in texture from the thin and mediocre version of 1940 to the rich tapestry of 1947. The numerous manuscripts allow a look at the processes by which Lowry created not only his masterwork but also his own reputation as a modernist genius. This study offers an extended examination of individual drafts as the novel slowly developed and, in a final chapter, an appraisal of the implications of Lowry's revisions for the book as published, an appraisal that suggests bases for new readings of Under the Volcano.

Ten years in the making, Under the Volcano is the best-known work of writer Malcolm Lowry. Published first in 1947, it is a brilliant, moving, and complex novel, perhaps the last fictional masterpiece to emerge from the modernist movement.As the years went by, Lowry's obsessive rewriting took him further and further into his book, which changed relatively little in the outer semblance of action and main characters but became utterly transformed in texture from the thin and mediocre version of 1940 to the rich tapestry of 1947. The numerous manuscripts allow a look at the processes by which Lowry created not only his masterwork but also his own reputation as a modernist genius. This study offers an extended examination of individual drafts as the novel slowly developed and, in a final chapter, an appraisal of the implications of Lowry's revisions for the book as published, an appraisal that suggests bases for new readings of Under the Volcano.