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State.” Yet this salutary, now definite news was not being entirely celebrated at the Cline Mansion. The notion that Mary Flannery was going off, by herself, to a school in the Midwest was nearly unthinkable. Up until graduation, O’Connor’s classmates were still walking her home at night, the two blocks from college meetings at Beeson Hall. Yet fragile appearances to the contrary, their sheltered niece obviously had a mind of her own, and her father’s quiet, stubborn will to back up her decisions. With Savannah in her past, having met John Sullivan of Ohio, and reading far and wide, she knew well the limits of Milledgeville.

As O’Connor later summed up her personal longitude and latitude at this juncture, in her “Biography,” written at Iowa, she felt that her big opportunity came in the form of the fellowship to graduate school. She hoped that the experience would either verify her suitability for little else but the job of teaching ninth-graders in Podunk, Georgia — the horizon line for most women majoring in English at GSCW — or that she would discover a happier means of making a living. Writing in her journal during the summer of 1945, Mary Flannery’s response to the wishful, dire predictions of a number of her relatives that she would be home in three weeks came down to one word — “Humph!”

Chapter Four

Iowa

Sitting in his office early in the fall of 1945, Paul Engle, the director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, heard a gentle knock at the door. After he shouted an invitation to enter, a shy, young woman appeared and walked over to his desk without, at first, saying a word. He could not even tell, as she stood before him, whether she was looking in his direction, or out the window at the curling Iowa River below. A hulking six foot four inch poet, in his thirties, with wavy dark hair, alert blue eyes, and expressive eyebrows, Engle quickly took the lead. He introduced himself and offered her a seat, as she tightly held on to what he later claimed was “one of the most beat-up handbags I’ve ever seen.”

When she finally spoke, her Georgia dialect sounded so thick to his Midwestern ear that he asked her to repeat her question. Embarrassed by an inability a second time, to understand, Engle handed her a pad to write what she had said. So in schoolgirl script, she put down three short lines: “My name is Flannery O’Connor. I am not a journalist. Can I come to the Writers’ Workshop?” Engle suggested that she drop off writing samples, and they would consider her, late as it was. The next day a few stories arrived, and to his near disbelief, he found them to be “imaginative, tough, alive.” She was instantly accepted to the Workshop, both the name of Engle’s writing class and of his MFA graduate writing program, the first in the nation, to which she would switch her affiliation from the Graduate School of Journalism by the second semester.

For all of her outward timidity, she had quickly found her way to Engle, and her vocation. Just a few weeks earlier, the third week in September, she and her mother had departed Milledgeville together. In Atlanta, they boarded a train to Chicago, where they transferred at La Salle Street Station. They then made the four-hour trip west to Iowa City on the Rock Island Railroad, through a countryside of cornfields, apple orchards, and colts grazing on grassy hillocks. Anticipating subzero winters, O’Connor arrived carrying a fifteen-pound muskrat coat. Mrs. O’Connor stayed long enough to make sure that her only child was comfortably settled in Currier House, at 32 East Bloomington Street, a two-story, old-brick, corner building, housing fifteen or twenty graduate women in double rooms.

Iowa City was a nearly rural university town of about eighteen thousand year-round residents. Downtown consisted of four or five banks, a couple of hotels, as well as drugstores, bookshops, tea rooms, and beer halls rigged for student trade. Like Milledgeville, this Johnson County seat had once been the state capital, until the government moved to Des Moines, in 1855. Left behind was the gold-domed