Flannery O’Connor

Considered an important voice in American literature, O'Connor wrote two novels, 32 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. She was a Southern writer in the vein of William Faulkner , often writing in a Southern Gothic style and relying heavily on regional settings and grotesques as characters. A "born" Roman Catholic , her writing is deeply informed by the sacramental, and the Thomist notion that the created world is charged with God. Her most famous work is a collection of short stories which includes the eponymous “A Good Man is Hard to Find”

“The Life You Save May Be Your Own”

A one-armed tramp, appropriately named "Mr. Shiftlet," walks up to a run-down farm where an old woman and her retarded daughter, Lucynell, are sitting on the front porch. Lucynell cannot talk. Mr. Shiftlet persuades the old woman to hire him for work around the farm and for repairing a car. She says she can feed him but not pay him. Over a period of a few weeks he repairs the car (which is what he really wants) and offers to marry Lucynell if her mother will give him some money

After the wedding Mr. Shiftlet takes Lucynell on a honeymoon, but abandons her in a country diner the first day, claiming she's a hitchhiker. As he drives towards Mobile, he picks up a boy and begins to lecture him about being good to his mother. The angry boy jumps out of the car, and Mr. Shiftlet prays that God will "break forth and wash the slime from this earth."