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By Root 1539 0

rewrote it twice over the fall. Sending the story to her trusted adviser Caroline Gordon, she confided that “Mr. Ransom took the Artificial Nigger for the Kenyon but I think without enthusiasm. He complained that it was very flat and had no beautiful sentences in it. I rewrote it but there still ain’t any beautiful sentences.” Gordon agreed, and told her that she needed, in Flannery’s words, “to gain some altitude and get a larger view.” Working and reworking the ending, she finally achieved a nearly Miltonic description of Mr. Head’s transformation as “the action of mercy covered his pride like a flame and consumed it.” After the story’s publication in the Kenyon Review in the spring of 1955, she wrote a friend with some pride, of fulfilling her mentor’s wish, “In those last two paragraphs I have practically gone from the Garden of Eden to the Gates of Paradise.”

Having worked on a first novel for seven years, and never feeling entirely satisfied with the result, Flannery had now written eight or nine new stories within two years, and mostly liked them all. She was especially pleased with “The Artificial Nigger,” which she described as “my favorite and probably the best thing I’ll ever write.” Encouraged by Robert Giroux, she began putting together a collection under the title of his favorite story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” with an October delivery date and tentative spring 1955 publication. By Christmas 1954, Flannery felt assured enough to write to Sally Fitzgerald of the forthcoming volume, “Without yr kind permission I have taken the liberty of dedicating (grand verb) it to you and Robert. This is because you all are my adopted kin and if I dedicated it to any of my blood kin they would think they had to go into hiding. Nine stories about original sin, with my compliments.”

But soon after the beginning of the New Year, a tenth story about original sin combusted nearly spontaneously within the author, as no story ever had before. She wrote “Good Country People” “in about four days, the shortest I have written any thing in,” and with “less conscious technical control . . . than in any story I’ve ever written.” One morning Flannery simply began writing about her familiar pair, a divorced farm owner, Mrs. Hopewell, and busybody tenant, Mrs. Freeman. To her own surprise, “Before I realized it, I had equipped one of them with a daughter with a wooden leg.” Even more startling was the appearance of Manley Pointer, the Bible salesman, who tricks Mrs. Hopewell’s thirty-two-year-old daughter, Joy (she prefers “Hulga”) out of her prosthetic leg in a low joke of a hayloft seduction. As O’Connor later revealed at a Southern Writers’ Conference, “I didn’t know he was going to steal that wooden leg until ten or twelve lines before he did it, but when I found out that this was what was going to happen, I realized that it was inevitable. This is a story that produces a shock for the reader, and I think one reason is that it produced a shock for the writer.”

When Flannery sent this hastily written story to Caroline Gordon, her usually critical first reader was more enthusiastic than she had ever been. Mrs. Tate had a few quibbles about “the Om. Nar.” using phrases such as “kind of,” or some scenes that were weakly visualized, but mostly her letter consisted of unequivocal praise: “GOOD COUNTRY PEOPLE is a master-piece. Allen and I are in complete accord on that. Can’t you get it into the volume of short stories?” If Flannery wrote her shocker with unusual ease, Caroline Gordon was likewise remarkably hands-off in her editing. Allen Tate was impressed enough to telegram Robert Giroux his conviction, which he also expressed in a letter to Flannery: “It is without exception the most terrible and powerful story of Maimed Souls I have ever read.” Giroux wired Tate back that the story would indeed be fit into the collection, and perhaps his praise could serve as a jacket blurb.

Yet the genesis of the story was not entirely between Flannery and her literary friends, or even her subconscious. Developments in her relationship with Erik