Here is a typical “sentence” from James Joyce”s Finnegan’s Wake:

As the eighth story in Flannery O’Connor’s first published collection, A Good Man is Hard to Find, “A Late Encounter with the Enemy” invites readers to contemplate what many have perceived as the American south’s preoccupation with the region’s defeat during the American Civil War.

First, before a more direct encounter with O’Connor’s short story, however, readers might want to consider an important moment in another story by another writer from the American south: William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.” Near the end of Faulkner’s superb gothic tale, a story that is frequently and justifiably anthologized in college-level literature survey course textbooks, the narrator makes this perceptive observation about the old men who come to a funeral: “[A]nd the very old men—some in their brushed Confederate uniforms—on the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing they that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottleneck of the most recent decade of years.” Remember the metaphor—meadow for memory—when reading “A Late Encounter with the Enemy.”

Second, further postponing our encounter with O’Connor’s story, consider first southern writer Walker Percy’s explanation for why the American south produced so many good writers: “Because we lost the War.” O’Connor, responding to Percy (in her essay entitled “The Regional Writer”), expands upon Percy’s theory by suggesting that the American Civil War had a profound effect upon the collective psyche of southerners: “What he was saying was that we have had our Fall[.

Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” (CS 236-48) invites readers to consider carefully what O’Connor referred to elsewhere as our “inburnt knowledge of [our] human limitations [and] sense of mystery” within the modern world (MM 59).

Enjoy a snippet of old film footage in which little Mary Flannery O’Connor from Savannah, Georgia, the girl who would become one of America’s most important authors. You will see Ms. O’Connor and her backward-walking chicken, both of which are featured in a 1932 Pathe News release.