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used names that could be found in the local phone book — H. T. Shiftlet lived on Route 1; Lucynell Smith had attended her Wise Blood book party. But as she began to describe the widow Lucynell Crater, and her nearly thirty-year-old mute daughter, also Lucynell Crater, visited by the one-armed handyman, Tom T. Shiftlet, she found herself writing, too, about the grounds of Andalusia, as reflected in the purposely distorting mirror of her imagination: “The old woman and her daughter were sitting on their porch when Mr. Shiftlet came up their road for the first time. The old woman slid to the edge of her chair and leaned forward, shading her eyes from the piercing sunset with her hand. The daughter could not see far in front of her and continued to play with her fingers.”

Flannery received much praise for the subtle recalibration in her style. Described by Robert Fitzgerald as “a triumph over Erskine Caldwell,” this breakout story, marking her first treatment of a mother-daughter relationship, and introducing a “gentleman caller,” used Tobacco Road–type poor-white characters without being clichéd, and to fierce moral ends. By December, Flannery learned that she was the recipient of a two-thousand-dollar Kenyon Review fiction fellowship, having been invited to apply by its editor, John Crowe Ransom. Her award was followed by publication, in the spring 1953 issue, of “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” which went on to win the second prize in the 1954 O. Henry Award. But Flannery had conveyed that something significant was stirring as soon as she wrote the opening description of the daughter, resembling, as only she knew, her recently delivered bird: “She had long pink-gold hair and eyes as blue as a peacock’s neck.”

Chapter Seven

The “Bible” Salesman

Like all good farm folk, we get up in the morning as soon as the first chicken cackles,” Flannery wrote to her friends Louise and Tom Gossett in 1961. But she could just as easily have written that report during her first few months on the farm, or any time since. Certainly by early 1953 Flannery had settled into a schedule and rhythm that remained unvaried for the rest of her life. The woman who came to believe that “routine is a condition of survival” guarded her daily regimen, with the help of her mother and a self-protective instinct, but also with contentment and joy. As she implied to the Gossetts, each day followed a pattern, beginning with her mother, up first, waiting with a thermos of coffee for the two of them to drink at the kitchen table while listening to the local weather report on the radio.

This cycle of hours and days had a religious significance for Flannery, too. As Thomas Merton, a self-described “14th century man,” abandoned New York City for the life of prayer and farming of a contemplative monk in Kentucky, so Flannery, dubbing herself a “thirteenth century” Catholic at Yaddo and, at Andalusia, a “hermit novelist,” framed her new life in religion. Immediately on waking, she read the prayers for Prime, prescribed for six in the morning, from her 1949 edition of A Short Breviary. Following coffee, she and her mother then drove into town to attend mass at Sacred Heart, celebrated most weekday mornings at seven; the priest, for a decade, was the charming, bridge-playing Father John Toomey from Augusta. “Flannery sat in the fifth pew on the right side,” recalled one parishioner. On Sundays, Flannery pulled on her black wool tam-o’-shanter to get to the earliest seven-fifteen mass. As she wrote a friend, in 1953, “I like to go to early mass so I won’t have to dress up — combining the 7th Deadly Sin with the Sunday obligation.”

Not merely a personal peculiarity, regularity was a civic virtue, too. Flannery was surrounded by family, and friends, who arranged their lives like clockwork. Regina was a stickler, and Flannery could chafe at her rules and regulations, but as long as her own writing time and space were kept sacred (of her writing desk, she said to a friend, “Nobody lays a hand on that, boy”) she could accept other impositions. “She didn