Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [190]
117 “one of the most”: The account of the meeting is drawn from two sources: Colman McCarthy, “Servant of Literature in the Heart of Iowa,” Washington Post, March 27, 1983; and Paul Engle, letter to Robert Giroux, July 13, 1971, “Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc. Records,” New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. In the Post piece, Engle gives a slightly different version of the note as: “My name is Flannery O’Connor. I’m from Milledgeville, Georgia. I’m a writer.”
118 State University of Iowa: The name of the university was shortened, in 1964, to the University of Iowa.
118 “naturally blank”: FOC to Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell, March 17, 1953, CW, 910.
119 “Iowa City was a bustling place”: John Gruen, in discussion with the author, October 5, 2006.
119 “hick”: James B. Hall, e-mail to the author, September 14, 2006.
120 “a new Bohemia”: James B. Hall, Contemporary Authors: Autobiography Series 12 (Detroit: Gale Research Series, 1990), 132; Hall went on to write about twenty books of fiction and nonfiction, and was the founding provost of the Arts College of the University of California at Santa Cruz.
120 “I did know what it meant”: FOC to Maryat Lee, February 24, 1957, CW, 1023.
120 Currier House: O’Connor did form a friendship with one roommate, Louise Trovato.
120 “I went to St. Mary’s”: FOC to Roslyn Barnes, December 12, 1960, HB, 422.
121 “shom storrowies”: James B. Hall, Seems Like Old Times, edited by Ed Dinger (Iowa City: Iowa Writers’ Workshop, 1986), 13.
121 “Who was likely”: Richard Gilman, “On Flannery O’Connor,” New York Review of Books 13, no. 3 (August 21, 1969): 24.
121 “selling stories”: Bob Fawcell, “William Porter’s Writing Career — from Pulp to Post,” Daily Iowan, January 26, 1946.
122 “You can get an M.A. degree”: “Engle, Paul,” Current Biography 1942 (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1942), 249.
122 “was able to breathe”: FOC to Betty Hester, December 29, 1956, CW, 1017.
123 “a man’s realization”: FOC, State University of Iowa examination blue book, November 28, 1945, GCSU.
123 “It was a plain little room”: Jane Wilson, in discussion with the author, October 5, 2006. The original offices for the Writers’ Workshop were in Calvin Hall, just up the hill from the Iowa Memorial Union on Jefferson Street.
123 “Each meeting consists”: Paul Engle, “How Creative Writing Is Taught at the University of Iowa Workshop,” Des Moines Sunday Register, December 28, 1947.
123 “Her voice was quiet”: Mary Mudge Wiatt, in discussion with the author, October 1, 2006.
124 “dat coat”: FOC, “The Coat,” DoubleTake 2, no. 3 (Summer 1996): 39.
124 “What first stuns”: FOC, “The Writer and the Graduate School,” Alumnae Journal 13, no. 4 (Summer 1948): 4. She was more tart by the time she said in a later talk, “Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is they don’t stifle enough of them.” FOC, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” MM, 84.
124 “of the right sort”: James B. Hall, “Our Workshops Remembered: The Heroic Phase,” unpublished essay, 6, private collection.
124 “It did spoil”: Robie Macauley, Esprit: Journal of Thought and Opinion 8, no. 1 (University of Scranton, Scranton, Pa., Winter 1964): 34.
125 “Flannery was so cold”: Norma Hodges, in discussion with the author, May 6, 2005.
125 “I couldn’t though have written”: FOC to Maryat Lee, February 24, 1957, CW, 1023.
126 “pitched himself”: Norma Hodges, in discussion with the author, May 6, 2005.
126 “This scene of the attempted”: McCarthy, “Servant of Literature,” Washington Post, March 27, 1983.
126 “I was right young”: Sally Fitzgerald, “A Master Class: From the Correspondence of Caroline Gordon and Flannery O’Connor,” Georgia Review 33, no. 4. (Winter 1979): 845.
127 “When I went there”: Katherine Fugin, Faye Rivard, and Margaret Sieh, “An Interview with Flannery O’Connor, Censer (College of St. Teresa, Winona, Minn., Fall 1960): 59.
127 “discarded subject”: FOC, “The