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by talking widely of her talent. “Why, she can just walk by a poolroom and know exactly what’s happening by the smell,” he told James B. Hall, the “second-best” writer in class. As the Brooklyn native Eugene Brown explains, “People who were favored in the Writers’ Workshop at that time were Southern writers.” This suspicion of Southern loyalty was only confirmed with the campus visit during the week of April 21 of the Fugitive poet and Sewanee Review editor Allen Tate. In his class “critique,” Tate likewise paid special attention to Lytle’s protégée.

Flannery was busily filling out applications and gathering together her finished manuscripts by early May 1947. First she applied for several college teaching positions, just in case. “It comes to us all,” she moaned of the dreaded profession. She then enlisted Barbara Tunnicliff to type her thesis project, The Geranium: A Collection of Short Stories. “She paid me for doing it and watched over me as I did,” recalled her former suitemate. O’Connor dedicated the work, for his extraordinary support, “To Paul Engle, whose interest and criticism have made these stories better than they would otherwise have been.” Norma Hodges remembers helping Flannery and a mutual friend, Carol Nutter, carry stacks of its pages from the print shop. According to Hodges, continuously feeling shunned by her, when they arrived at the door of Nutter’s second-floor apartment, Flannery coldly discouraged her from entering, wishing to be alone with her friend Carol: “Her magnified eyes swam up punctuating an unspoken, ‘Don’t you dare come in!’”

In the synopsis required for her Rinehart application, O’Connor hinted that a starting point, if not blueprint, for Haze’s quest might be found in T. S. Eliot’s shattered epic of modern life, The Waste Land, a poem revered by her New Critic writer-instructors: “His search for a physical home mirrors his search for a spiritual one, and although he finds neither, it is the latter search which saves him from becoming a member of the Wasteland and makes him worth 75,000 words.”

Partly the reference was parody, a use of a buzzword. But unlike her joke on Proust in high school, she was reading Eliot’s poems and essays very closely and sympathetically. As a poet at once modern and devout, having converted to Anglo-Catholicism a decade after writing his poem of “fragments I have shored against my ruins,” Eliot was a figure of fascination to O’Connor. Traces of this deep interest dot her Iowa pages: a “dead geranium” is a central image of his poem “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”; the fortune-teller Madame Sosostris of The Waste Land shows up in a draft of her novel as Madame Sosistra; her mummy’s colloquial museum label, “once as tall as you or me,” is lifted from Eliot’s line about Phlebas the Phoenician, “once as handsome and tall as you.”

All of this hard work finally paid off during the fourth week in May, when she received official word that she was the winner of the Rinehart-Iowa Award, and that Engle had pulled strings to secure her a teaching assistantship for the following year. In an interview accompanying her photograph and front-page story in the Daily Iowan, she insisted that her novel about a man searching for a spiritual home was not a “typed” novel: “Any author who follows a hard and fast outline allows himself to become a slave to the typewriter.” To celebrate, on May 29 she traveled by car to Cedar Rapids with her roommate, Martha Bell, and housemother, Sarah Dawson. “We had dinner there,” Bell recorded in her diary, “did some window-shopping and then went to see The Egg and I.” The plot of the light romantic comedy they chose concerned a society girl (Claudette Colbert) who is persuaded by her new husband (Fred MacMurray) to start a chicken farm.

Also celebrating the end of the semester, Paul Engle and his wife, Mary, threw a picnic at Stone City, their Victorian summer house, previously belonging to Grant Wood, next to a limestone quarry. Charles Embree, a Missouri writer whose first Workshop story, “Concerning the Mop,” about jazz, had just been published