“Good Country People” was originally published as one of a collection of short stories in 1955. Although criticism about specific aspects of the story has been written, most of the criticism of O'Connor's work is focused on her output as a whole rather than on individual stories or novels. This is the case because O'Connor was a specific type of writer. She did not write with varying styles and on different topics but rather infused the same techniques and themes into everything she wrote. The surprise was not in what she was going to write about but in how she would present it.
Indeed, the author considered it her duty to shock readers. In his critical essay “Grace and the Grotesque: Flannery O'Connor on the Page and on the Screen,” writer Jon M. Sweeney quotes O'Connor as remarking,
When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal ways of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.
Often compared to such great writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Fyodor Dostoevsky, O'Connor possessed a unique voice and remarkable talent with which to present it. She was a Catholic writer whose worldview was developed through a fervent religious doctrine, one that, it seems, was not always understood, much less appreciated, by critics (hence, her need to make her vision apparent via shock). However, her story collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find was published to much acclaim. It was this collection that cemented her reputation as a southern gothic writer, although the author herself preferred the term 'southern grotesque.”
Her stories rarely revolve around likable characters, and each is almost without exception what O'Connor, quoted by Brad Gooch in a New York Times article, called a “freak,” either physically or emotionally, sometimes both. Despite the author's fervent Catholicism, the majority of her characters are Protestant, and the American South she depicts in her fiction is much more than local color. Her respect for the mystery of life, rooted in her religious beliefs, informed everything she ever wrote. “The writer's gaze has to extend beyond the surface, beyond mere problems until it touches that realm of mystery that is the concern of prophets,” O'Connor once said, as quoted in a 1966 essay that originally appeared in Atlanta magazine.
It has been widely speculated that much of what is explored and revealed in “Good Country People” is a reflection of O'Connor's own life. The story's main female character, Hulga, is disfigured and in ill health, much like O'Connor was for most of her adult life. Hulga has a brief yet torrid affair with a traveling Bible salesman, and the author herself experienced a similar relationship with a traveling textbook salesman named Erik Langkjaer.
In letters to friends and Langkjaer himself, which are made available by Sally Fitzgerald in her book The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor and are explored by Mark Bosco in the Southern Review, it becomes apparent that there are indeed similarities between O'Connor's fictional plot and her actual life experience. Those letters, especially the ones written to Langkjaer, reveal a more passionate and emotional O'Connor than one might imagine from her fictional writing. When Langkjaer returned to his native Denmark in 1954 because he felt he did not fit into American society, O'Connor became lonesome and wrote to him:
You wonder how anybody can be happy in his home as long as there is one person without one. I never thought of this so much until I began to know you and your situation and I will never quite have a home again on account of it.
To that letter she added a postscript: “I feel like if you were here we could talk about a million years without stopping.”
Whatever the influence, “Good Country People” exemplified O'Connor's writing at its finest, and it was part of the 1971 posthumously published collection that won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1972.