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literary conscience, “I was right young and very ignorant and I thought what I was doing was mighty powerful (it wasn’t even intelligible at that point) and liable to corrupt anybody that read it and me too.” Her solution was to visit one of the local Iowa City priests and carefully explain the problem. The priest drew out from his stash “one of those ten cent pamphlets that they are never without” and told her that she didn’t need to write for fifteen-year-old girls. While this permission to write for a wider adult audience was helpful, his pamphlet failed to impress when she discovered that its Jesuit author deemed A Tree Grows in Brooklyn “about as good as you could get.”

O’Connor later told an interviewer, concerning the Workshop, “When I went there I didn’t know a short story from an ad in the newspaper.” In spite of her insecurities, Engle encouraged her to keep submitting work for publication. Her first submission to the Sewanee Review was rejected over Christmas break. But in February, she mailed off two more stories, “The Geranium” and “The Crop,” to Accent magazine. A broad satire in the style of some of her juvenile fiction, “The Crop” concerned a spinster schoolmarm with pretensions of becoming a writer of “social problem” stories. Like the young Miss O’Connor, trying on different author’s story lines, the assiduous Miss Willerton, sitting in front of her typewriter, “discarded subject after subject and it usually took her a week or two to decide finally on something.”

In March, close to her twenty-first birthday, O’Connor received word that “The Geranium” had been accepted for publication in the summer issue of Accent. Flannery was now “published,” a crucial distinction in the Workshop. A “little magazine” from the University of Illinois, credited with printing the first stories of J. F. Powers and William Gass, Accent was on a short list of publications considered “of the right sort” among the Workshop members. Flannery admitted to a fellow student that she had not begun to think of herself as a fiction writer until the respected literary magazine had taken her first story, adding, “Although I reckon I got a long way to get yet before I’m what you call good at it.” As she simply parsed her achievement at Iowa to the TV interviewer Harvey Breit, in 1955, “Then I began to write short stories, publicly.”

Mixed feelings about having been picked out, but mildly censored, by John Crowe Ransom, were transformed into pure pleasure when Robert Penn Warren selected a story of hers from a pile of student work during a visit to the university in April 1946. Warren had delivered a talk in the Senate Chamber of Old Capitol on his story “Blackberry Winter”; his new novel that year, All the King’s Men, was awarded the 1947 Pulitzer Prize. Another Southerner, and an editor of her Understanding Fiction anthology, “Red” Warren was one of the more influential writers and critics of the moment. As James B. Hall has recalled, “When R. P. Warren cocked one eye and said, ‘By god, I like this paragraph right heahr!’ — well, something happened. You were stronger, more daring, more resolved the next time out.”

Just as important to Flannery’s maturing as a writer was advice she received before the end of the spring semester from Paul Horgan, her instructor in Imaginative Writing, a backup course to the Workshop. Hired in February, “Lt. Col. Paul Horgan,” as the student newspaper identified the recently discharged officer, was a novelist and 1946 Guggenheim Fellow. O’Connor later told Betty Hester that “Horgan never even knew I was in the room, I am sure — though once he noted about forty things wrong with a story of mine and I thought him a fine teacher.” His advice to the girl he did indeed later remember as “a sort of waif of the art of writing” was to set aside a number of hours daily for writing — same time, same place. That habit became her lifelong regimen, the very soul of her artistic credo. She later shared her discipline with a young writer, in 1957: “I write only about two hours every day because that’s all the energy I