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later remembered, “From one end of it protruded a long royal-blue neck and crested head. A white line above and below each eye gave the investigating head an expression of alert composure.” Flannery jumped out of the car and bounded forward as the bird quickly withdrew its head at her approach. Transporting the box back to Andalusia, mother and daughter, with help, undid the lid, unpacking a peacock, a hen, and four seven-week-old “peabiddies.” Knowing the bird so far only by its literary reputation, as the pet of Hera, the wife of Zeus, Flannery would have to wait for the display of its full complement of tail feathers — “a map of the universe” — shed in late summer, and not fully regained until Christmas.

“As soon as the birds were out of the crate, I sat down and began to look at them,” O’Connor remembered nine years later, in her essay “The King of the Birds.”

I have been looking at them ever since, from one station or another, and always with the same awe as on that first occasion; though I have always, I feel, been able to keep a balanced view and an impartial attitude. The peacock I had bought had nothing whatsoever in the way of a tail, but he carried himself as if he not only had a train behind him but a retinue to attend it. On that first occasion, my problem was so greatly what to look at first that my gaze moved constantly from the cock to the hen to the four young peachickens, while they, except that they gave me as wide a berth as possible, did nothing to indicate they knew I was in the pen. . . . When I first uncrated these birds, in my frenzy I said, “I want so many of them that every time I go out the door, I’ll run into one.”

By the time of the arrival of these first peacocks — a sure sign of her intention to settle at home, in earnest — Flannery was already finding new inspiration for her fiction, as well, in the vagaries of small-town life. She had made a first sketchy attempt at rendering down-home material in her savage satire “A Late Encounter with the Enemy,” based on the Milledgeville Union-Recorder article about a Confederate general’s appearance at the graduation of his much younger wife. In O’Connor’s tall tale, General Tennessee Flintrock Sash, his name a send-up of Stonewall Jackson, dies of a stroke, following his granddaughter’s graduation. His corpse is then wheeled to a Coca-Cola machine by a clueless Boy Scout — the local paper having likewise been running ads for the Georgia-based soft drink featuring the Scouts. While the conceit of a corpse treated as if it were still alive owed its weirdness to Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” O’Connor sidestepped the master’s tone and language, in what she disparagingly called “my one-cylander syntax.”

This same vernacular prose and comic clarity helped her agent to place “A Late Encounter with the Enemy” in August, with Alice Morris, the fiction editor at Harper’s Bazaar, a glossy women’s magazine, which indicated the popular appeal that Flannery’s high art potentially possessed. When the news reached Lowell, he wrote her, “Someone said you had something in Harper’s Bazaar, but I can’t believe it.” She wrote back, of the story not published until the next September, “I did have one in Harper’s Bazaar about a Confederate General who was a hundred and four years old, but nobody sees things in those magazines except the ladies that go to the beauty parlors.” Actually, under Editor in Chief Carmel Snow, whose motto was “well-dressed women with well-dressed minds,” the magazine was including much important fiction by Capote, McCullers, Cheever, Christopher Isherwood, and Katherine Anne Porter, among all its illustrations of haute couture.

The story that truly showed O’Connor finding her most resonant subject matter, though, was the aptly named “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” — its title suggested by Robert Fitzgerald, based on road signs he had seen while driving through the South, in place of her first two choices: “Personal Interest” and “The World Is Almost Rotten.” For this trickster’s tale, which she sent to her agent in October, Flannery