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the spring of 1953, in this “rat’s nest of old papers, clippings, torn manuscripts, ancient quarterlies,” O’Connor began work on a second novel, as well as several short stories that established her control of the genre and were told in an inimitable voice, sliding in and out of the colloquial heads of her characters. Each of these stories concerned death, the powerful theme that had been dealt her, especially since the revelation of her summer visit with the Fitzgeralds. Having described herself as a girl as “a Peter Rabbit man,” menace was always her great effect. But in “You Can’t Be Any Poorer Than Dead,” begun as the first chapter of her new novel, the macabre slapstick of the teenage Francis Marion Tarwater (his last name swiped from Tom T. Shiftlet’s hometown) — tempted to shirk burying his great-uncle, but haunted by the old man’s corpse still propped at the breakfast table — had the depth of what Henry James called “felt life.” This quality was missing from the ghoulish tales of stabbings and strangling in O’Connor’s juvenilia.

In “The River,” finished in November 1952 and full of images of “speckled” skeletons, the preschooler Harry undergoes a drowning-baptism. The next day he tragically finds his way back to the river in the Georgia clay country, red-orange after a rain, where he was baptized by the Reverend Bevel Summers while on an outing with his sitter, Mrs. Connin. As the little boy gives himself over to the undertow of death, and possibly salvation, his parents are nursing hangovers in their city apartment — a satiric cartoon of bohemianism, cluttered with overflowing ashtrays and abstract paintings. To write Mrs. Connin’s adoring attitude toward their hymn-singing minister — “He’s no ordinary preacher” — O’Connor borrowed freely from Mrs. Stevens, who had recently told her of a dramatic sermon by her own preacher, also a fine singer: “Evy eye is on him. . . . Not a breath stirs.”

Conceiving “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” she connected the dots of a few articles that had mesmerized, or tickled, her: the Atlanta Constitution reported on a petty bank robber with the alias “The Misfit”; she clipped a photograph of a tartly made-up little girl, in a tutu, incongruously mimicking Bessie Smith’s rendition of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” at a talent contest. Yet the laughter in her light tale of a fifties’ suburban Atlanta family waylaid on a road trip is silenced by the gunshots of her own “Misfit,” a prophet of existentialist nihilism, far more harrowing than Haze Motes. The scene of the family’s murder is a dark wood, as foreboding as Hawthorne’s in “Young Goodman Brown,” which is faintly echoed in the title as well. “It was no coincidence that Flannery wrote that story within months of, metaphorically, having a gun aimed at her,” said Sally Fitzgerald, of her reaction when Flannery mailed her a draft in the spring of 1953.

Flannery sent the stories, as well, to her agent and her publisher. Hired away from Partisan Review by Harcourt Brace’s Robert Giroux, his copy editor and first reader Catharine Carver was excited about O’Connor’s writing. “Catie would read them first and say, ‘Bob, wait till you see this one, a new story has come in,’” Giroux recalled. “This happened, every time, over a series of months. . . . I remember one day Catharine brought me one. I didn’t read it in the office. I had a batch of stuff, and I took it home that night and read ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find.’ I thought, This is one of the greatest short stories ever written in the United States. It’s equal to Hemingway, or Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener.’ And it absolutely put her on the map.” In his Christmas card of 1953, Lowell included praise of her recent works: “Both the baptizing and the homicidal lunatic are fearfully good.”

Writing with such intensity, with “a fresh mind” during the mornings, she might well have been entirely spent by afternoon. This normal diastole and systole was accentuated in her case by the disease, generally resulting in fatigue after two or three useful hours a day. Afternoons, for Flannery, were