“Good Country People” was originally published in the June 1955 issue of Harper's Bazaar. It was collected in A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955). It is currently most readily available in A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich).

The first thing to say about this story is that it's funny— funny as a crutch, to use a cliché the author might either appreciate or wince at. It happens to be the first work of hers I ever read, and I remember coming to it not expecting to laugh. I was a big reader of Time magazine in those days, and I think they told me that Flannery O'Connor was Southern, Gothic, deep, and Roman Catholic. Furthermore, I knew that she had a mysteriously degenerative disease called lupus, and had recently died of it at a relatively early age. So naturally I was expecting to read something shadowy, profound, and grim. “Good Country People” certainly is all those things, but it is also very funny.

I read it because I had to. In the mid-1960s, I was teaching an Introduction to Literature course in the Humanities Department at M.I.T., and “Good Country People” happened to be one of the stories in the designated anthology. I tossed this story onto the syllabus rather arbitrarily, but when I finally got around to reading it for class, it blew me away. I could tell from the classroom response that it blew the students away too. And it has stayed with me ever since.

It is first and foremost a good yarn. If you try telling it to people who haven't read it, they follow it easily and eagerly. In the 1960s, I even told it, in a somewhat censored version, to my four young children during a long trip in the car, and it apparently stayed with them too, since elements of it still come up in family conversations. Reading it again now, I see new and different things in it, but the clean thrust of its narrative line remains very impressive.