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much like William Blake’s perverse reading of John Milton as “of the Devil’s party.” Flannery never sanctioned the notion, but neither was she completely dismissive. She even baited Hawkes a bit. When she learned he would be writing an essay accompanying “The Lame Shall Enter First,” she sent him the story with a teasing note: “In this one, I’ll admit that the devil’s voice is my own.” When Hawkes’s “Flannery O’Connor’s Devil” appeared in the summer of 1962, she wrote him, “I like the piece very very much.” But, privately, to Ted Spivey, she refuted the essay as “off-center”: “Jack Hawkes’ view of the devil is not a theological one. His devil is an impeccable literary spirit whom he makes responsible for all good literature. Anything good he thinks must come from the devil. He is a good friend of mine and I have had this out with him many times, to no avail.”

FLANNERY TRIED UNSUCCESSFULLY to withdraw “The Lame Shall Enter First” in final page proofs, when she “decided that I don’t like it.” Over the next year and a half she often spoke of finding herself at a creative impasse. When Father McCown wrote, praising “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” which appeared in The Best American Short Stories 1962, she answered vulnerably, “But pray that the Lord will send me some more. I’ve been writing for sixteen years and I have the sense of having exhausted my original potentiality and being now in need of the kind of grace that deepens perception, a new shot of life or something.”

Such reappraising began as she approached her thirty-seventh birthday. Flannery had never marked her birthdays with any celebration. When Betty sent her a birthday card that year, she responded, “When I was a child I used to dread birthdays for fear R. would throw a surprise party for me. My idea of hell was the door bursting open and a flock of children pouring in yelling SURPRISE! Now I don’t mind them. That danger is over.” Yet she was obviously meditating during this Lenten season on a curious quiet in her usually noisy life of the imagination, as she struggled with the flu in her front room, which was thick with the scent of Vicks VapoRub. Her sense of being at a juncture was clearly borne out during the morning work hours: 1962 was remarkable as a year when she created no new stories. Instead she gave nearly a dozen public talks and readings.

In April, she made the first of these “powerful social” appearances by speaking at both Meredith College and North Carolina State College, “strictly a technical school,” in Raleigh, on “The Grotesque in Southern Literature.” Returning home for a week, she was then off again to Converse College, in Spartanburg, South Carolina, to take part in a literary festival with Eudora Welty, Cleanth Brooks, and Andrew Lytle. Exempting Welty from the scorn she often expressed for her fellow Southern writers — especially Carson McCullers, whose recent novel, Clock Without Hands, she derided as “the worst book I have ever read” — Flannery respected the older writer. “I really liked Eudora Welty,” she confirmed to Cecil Dawkins. “No pretence whatsoever, just a real nice woman.” She loved retelling Welty’s anecdote of sending a love scene to Faulkner for criticism, and his replying, “Honey, it isn’t the way I would do it, but you go right ahead.”

She did find time, when she returned to Andalusia, to write a preface for a reissue of Wise Blood, to be published by Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. Her one-paragraph note, requested by Giroux, was mostly a technical requirement for lengthening copyright. She had resisted the assignment for several months, complaining to Betty that “‘Explanations’ are repugnant to me” and feeling that future critics should simply read everything she had written, “even and particularly the Mary Ann piece.” Nonetheless, she set to work constructing a note that she intended to be “light and oblique. No claims & very few assertions.” The final result, though, was rather heavy, and blunt. Forever prevented from mistaking the novel as a satire on religion, readers opening this edition, with its red cover