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the interest following, would have been impossible had Flannery not kept her eye, during her last six months, on “the pin point of light” that Mrs. Flood kept trying to make out at the end of Wise Blood. As O’Connor took pains to correct the galleys of “Revelation” the night before her operation in Baldwin County Hospital; or hid under her pillow, at Piedmont, the notebook in which she was scratching out “Parker’s Back”; or worked, back home, making changes to “Judgment Day,” on a bedside desk Maryat Lee remembered as “one of those flimsy tables from Woolworth’s,” she was intent on “going home,” closing the circle, making a book, rigging the peacock’s tail to unfurl. It was no accident that Haze had been stuck in a train berth, “like a coffin,” or, O’Connor was anxious to conclude, that Tanner pops up from his, shouting, “Judgment Day!”

Flannery had spent her life making literary chickens walk backward. But she had also spent much of her adult writing life looking down the barrel of the Misfit’s shotgun. Just as her friends had to discern the contours of true suffering between the lines of her funny vignettes of invalidism, so her stories included a coded spiritual autobiography. In her front room at Andalusia, rewriting some final words while “the grim reaper” waited, she stuck in a last wink and a smirk, not just to Caroline Gordon and Robert Giroux, but to that one reader she claimed she would be happy with “in a hundred years.” After old Tanner’s daughter fulfills her father’s wish to ship his body home to Georgia, Flannery — in the story’s closing line, written mostly in quavering blue ink — endowed her with the hint of a resurrected body:

Now she rests well at night and her good looks have mostly returned.

Acknowledgments

I first stepped into the world of Flannery O’Connor in the late 1970s. She was my favorite fiction writer, and I would often read a few paragraphs of “The Artificial Nigger” or “Revelation” for inspiration while trying my hand at writing stories completely unlike hers. I was a graduate student at Columbia University at the time, too, with a concentration in Medieval and Renaissance Literature and, between the lines of her stories, I imagined that I detected qualities that struck me as “thirteenth-century” — ribald humor, gargoyled faces and bodies, frontal action, threats of violence, and, most of all, the subtle tug of a spiritual quest in a dark universe animated by grace and significance.

The timing of this literary infatuation proved lucky. While I was still under the sway of O’Connor’s fiction, The Habit of Being, a collection of her letters, edited by her friend Sally Fitzgerald, appeared in 1979, accompanied by much press attention. I apparently wasn’t the only one with a deep fascination with the mysterious woman behind the striking fiction. I did have an “aha!” experience while reading in the letters of the impact of the theology of Thomas Aquinas on her fiction. But such heady theories quickly became grounded in the even more compelling daily gossip. I would read a few letters and then turn to the back cover to study again the Joe McTyre 1962 photograph of O’Connor on her front steps, seemingly engaged in dialogue with a preening peacock.

Seized with the bright idea that I, and no one else, should attempt a biography of Flannery O’Connor — though I had so far published only a chapbook of poetry — I wrote to Sally Fitzgerald. I had heard somewhere that she was writing a memoir of O’Connor, and I wondered if she would approve my going forward. She responded on February 26, 1980, from the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, where she was a fellow, with the leveling news that she was writing a literary biography and that I would do well to find another subject. “In short,” she wrote, “I am afraid that our projects would overlap in important ways.” She let me down politely, though, kindly adding, “Should I ever feel the need of an assistant, I will certainly think of you and your proposal.”

I awaited the appearance of Fitzgerald’s book for over two decades. Early