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Stuck on the farm, Flannery depended on these random visitors for a wider social life; likewise she avidly relied on local events for fodder for her fiction. As she had told Erik when he accused her of parlaying their time together into “Good Country People”: “Never let it be said that I don’t make the most of experience and information, no matter how meager.” By the summer of 1956, most noticeable to her was the encroachment of the modern world, as commercialism and industrialization transformed the landscape and Andalusia received its first telephone line — number 2-5335 — described by Flannery as “a great mother-saver.” Georgia Power Company’s Sinclair Dam on the Oconee River had created a high-power generating plant and a fifteen-thousand-acre lake north of town. And Milledgeville was annexing a five-hundred-acre wooded area just across Highway 441 for a housing subdivision.

Andalusia, five years after mother and daughter took up full-time residence, was now a fully operating dairy farm, with its overseer, Regina O’Connor, characterized by one friend as “very oriented towards making money.” She was helped by the same crew of three or four full-time African American workers, as well as revolving white families, including the Stevenses, the Mays, and the Matysiaks, who departed, disgruntled, the next year, only to return two years later. Regina’s main emphasis was still on herds of milk-producing cows, and artificial breeding was deployed to ensure top milk-producing calves. Shetland ponies were a secondary operation, with six-month-old colts sold at market around Christmastime. But Mrs. O’Connor had also begun considering selling off timber rights; within a few summers, Flannery watched through the screen door as Regina held a front-porch auction for some pinewood acreage, bargaining for twenty-five thousand dollars more than expected.

O’Connor sketched the dangers of such development for the farm surrounded by a line of black piney woods in “A View of the Woods,” a story as political in its ecological implications as “The Displaced Person.” Completed in September 1956, her tale of greedy Mr. Fortune and his nine-year-old granddaughter — in love with a lawn and view that her grandfather is willing to sell off to a future of “houses and stores and parking places” — accurately described the fate of the Eatonton Highway area. “The electric power company had built a dam on the river and flooded great areas of the surrounding country,” she wrote in her story. “There was talk of their getting a telephone line. There was talk of paving the road that ran in front of the Fortune place.” Left standing at its climax, as published the next fall in Partisan Review, in place of the bull of “Greenleaf,” was a true “huge yellow monster,” an earth-digger machine, “gorging itself on clay.”

Of all Flannery’s new friends, the one she most wished to see at Andalusia, of course, was the one most resistant to visiting. But that fall she finally convinced Betty to return, promising her a ride from Atlanta with “breathless” Bill Sessions, just back from San Francisco, where he had been studying German at Berlitz in anticipation of his Fulbright trip abroad. The two friends visited on Saturday, October 23, with Regina planning a meal around sweet potatoes. Flannery had much to share. She had finished a painting of her chukar quail. And she and her mother were the proud owners of a stainless-steel Hotpoint refrigerator, with an automatic icemaker, bought with proceeds from the sale of “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” for a television adaptation. “While they make hash out of my story,” she said, “she and me will make ice in the new refrigerator.”

But in a letter immediately following the visit, Betty felt compelled to fill in Flannery on the details of what she called her “history of horror” before their friendship went any further. Hester had endured a particularly difficult childhood, as her father abandoned the family when she was young. At