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central symbol the bird she had once drawn in a preschool cartoon. In the story, a little boy, Ruller, “captured” a wild turkey, already shot dead in a ditch, interpreting the prize as a sign of favor from God. The juvenile preacher in training fancies himself, in one draft, “like Billy Grahme.” Imagining himself into the 1938 film Boys Town, “He thought of Bing Crosby and Spencer Tracy. He might found a place for boys to stay who were going bad.” But when his bird is swiped by just such bad boys, his faith becomes mixed with terror: “He was certain that Something Awful was tearing behind him.”

As important to the young writer as assiduously imitating the masters were her reading courses. She took Seminar in Literary Criticism, taught by Austin Warren, another rising star among the New Critics, at work at the time with Iowa Professor René Wellek on their landmark Theory of Literature. For her supplementary texts in the class of this cultivated, Jamesian gentleman, with a national reputation as an organist, she chose Joyce’s Dubliners and Brooks and Warren’s Understanding Fiction. During the class segment on Joyce, Warren treated her as the resident expert in Roman Catholicism, asking, “Now, Miss O’Connor, what are we talking about here?” She took, as well, a two-semester course, Philosophy in Literature; Aesthetics in the Philosophy Department; and Select Contemporary Authors, concentrating on modern European novelists.

By far her most significant literature class was a two-semester independent study, Reading for Final Exam, directed by Engle. “I didn’t really start to read until I went to Graduate School and then I began to read and write at the same time,” she rattled off her regimen to a friend:

Then I began to read everything at once, so much so that I didn’t have time I suppose to be influenced by any one writer. I read all the Catholic novelists, Mauriac, Bernanos, Bloy, Green, Waugh; I read all the nuts like Djuna Barnes and Dorothy Richardson and Va. Woolfe (unfair to the dear lady of course). I read the best Southern writers like Faulkner and the Tates, K. A. Porter, Eudora Welty and Peter Taylor; read the Russians, not Tolstoy so much but Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov and Gogol. I became a great admirer of Conrad and have read almost all his fiction.

Around Christmas 1946, Flannery started work on a new story, “The Train.” She began with the conscious intent to build a novel from its tale of Hazel Wickers, a nineteen-year-old, homesick, country rube returning South after the war. In choosing a first name as unisexual as her own, she relied on a custom she happily noticed among rural families who occasionally gave their sons feminine names — June, for instance. Her readings in Joyce and Faulkner were echoed in neologisms like “greyflying” to describe the train whizzing by. Yet what truly caught her imagination was a train ride home for the holidays. As she later explained the genesis of the story, “It started when I was on a train coming from Chicago. There was a Tennessee boy on it in uniform who was much taken up worrying the porter about how the berths were made up; the porter was so regal he just barely tolerated the boy.”

On the first leg of that holiday trip, Flannery made her way across downtown Chicago from La Salle Street Station to Dearborn Station, “a journey that never impressed me as beautiful.” She then caught the Dixie Limited, to travel from Illinois through Tennessee to Georgia. A discarded draft gives a glimpse, through Hazel’s eyes, of “the dilapidated [Dearborn] station, where the southern trains came in. There was a strange feeling in it for him, of awayness and homeness mixed. . . . It was a sooted red brick with turrets and inside it was grey and smoked and there were spittoons parked at the end of every third bench.” O’Connor later delighted in telling a friend of one of her own encounters at the terminus, “I sat down next to a colored woman in the waiting room at the Dearborn Street station in Chicago once. She was eating grapes and asked me to have some but I declined. She was very