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The title of his lit course was actually the title of its textbook, an anthology of stories that O’Connor later said Engle “was able to breathe some life into” — Understanding Fiction. Published in 1943, it had been edited by Cleanth Brooks, Jr., and Robert Penn Warren, with interspersed explanations. An academic marker for the fashionable school of New Criticism, its editors emphasized “close reading,” paying attention to the art and craft of stories, rather than to historical or cultural concerns, or to mining fiction for a series of psychological clues to a writer’s life. Many of the selections were eye-openers for Flannery: Caroline Gordon’s “Old Red”; Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace”; Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark”; William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.” In an exam essay, in November, she argued that Thomas Thompson’s “A Shore for the Sinking” was about “a man’s realization that he has been ‘left out.’” Engle wrote on her blue book, “A+. Admirable.”

All of the creative writers at Iowa, and many painters and musicians, too, passed through Engle’s Workshop. Still in its nascent wartime stage in the fall of 1945, the writing seminar was taught in the English Department faculty offices, or in a small classroom in the University Building, next to the Old Capitol on the Pentacrest of five buildings. “It was a plain little room in an old building on campus that nobody was competing for,” recalls one student. A dozen chairs would simply be drawn into an informal semicircle around a reading desk set on a platform a wooden step up from the floor. As Paul Engle described the class routine, in the Des Moines Register, “Each meeting consists of the reading of manuscripts by, customarily, two students. . . . The students are quite merciless in criticizing each other’s work, as well as in challenging the faculty before them.”

One of a small minority of women in the 1945 Workshop, Mary Mudge Wiatt, from Sioux City, was present the first time Flannery read a story. “Her voice was quiet, with a nice, rich Southern accent,” remembers Wiatt. “I thought she seemed not really at ease. She colored easily, flushed. I remember one scene where a white woman answers the door. A black man had some business with her. They spoke back and forth.” The story, a draft of “The Coat,” was Flannery’s attempt to mimic a selection she admired in her Understanding Fiction anthology, “The Necklace,” by Maupassant. In the original French moral tale, a string of paste jewels, mistaken for diamonds, destroys the heroine’s life. In her Southern rewrite, Rosa, a black washerwoman, invites tragedy on her husband, Abram, by wrongly imagining that he killed a white man for “dat coat.”

O’Connor wrote about this shaky period in Iowa, trying to find her way as a writer, for the Alumnae Journal at Georgia State College for Women, when the magazine was running a series on choices in career paths. In a piece titled “The Writer and the Graduate School,” which appeared in the summer of 1948, she confessed her initial doubts: “What first stuns the young writer emerging from college is that there is no clear-cut road for him to travel on. He must chop a path in the wilderness of his own soul; a disheartening process, lifelong and lonesome. Therefore, of what use graduate work?” She answered her own question, with some of her arch high school humor, by claiming that a creative writing program at least saved a few authentic writers from becoming one of the scholarly “dead birds” in “the literary woods”: “Some of these were laid away with Ph.D.’s and doubtless all with an excellent knowledge of Beowulf.” The MFA program was an alternative, she concluded, to “the poor house” and “the mad house.”

An early boost came with a classroom visit from the poet John Crowe Ransom, the founder and editor of the Kenyon Review, the house organ of the New Critics. Visits from such writers deemed, by Engle, “of the right sort,” were an important component of the Workshop.