By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Good Country People’ is one of the best-known and most widely studied short stories by Flannery O’Connor (1925-64).
The story, which focuses on a woman with a wooden leg who is befriended by a young and innocent-seeming bible salesman, takes in many themes, including innocence versus knowledge and our perceptions of others: perceptions which are often quite false.