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By Root 1414 0

in Esquire, drove Flannery to the party in his 1936 Ford coupe. Because of his Southern accent, Flannery often asked him to read her stories in class. “She was a loner,” says Embree. “Yet everybody respected her talent. It was apparent.” In one photograph of a dozen guests taken that day at the quarry, Flannery stands off to the side, in a heavy dark skirt and checked jacket. In a crowded group portrait in the living room, she is hidden behind the woman next to her, with only her knee showing. “It was wholly typical of Flannery that the part of her visible is the right knee,” wrote Engle. “There is a spirit about that knee.”

Springtime parties, no matter what the excuse, were the norm in Iowa City because of the demands of the extreme winters; the guests at Stone City that afternoon were mostly in high spirits simply from the mild break in the weather. “In spring, it was as though we had come through,” wrote James B. Hall. “The Iowa countryside was one long, low lyric of fields growing.” For the trip back, Andrew Lytle offered rides to both James Hall and Flannery, who tucked herself silently into the back seat, her extreme quietness making her more a potent presence. Hall recalls that “Andrew was talking about Flannery’s recent distinction, her Rinehart Award. He was driving, but looked closely at me, also in the front seat. I thought he was rubbing it in, and also seeing how I was taking the news.”

In the days immediately following, Flannery returned to Milledgeville for the summer, where she joined the Cline family, still mourning the sudden death of Uncle Bernard at the end of January. Her relatives were trying to deal with the practicalities of his will, including his bequest of Sorrel Farm to Regina and Louis. On a bus trip to Atlanta in the fall of 1946, Flannery had chanced to sit next to a descendant of the Hawkins family, the original owners, who informed her that the farm, in the nineteenth century, had been called Andalusia, after a province of southern Spain. She wrote her mother, pushing for reinstating its fanciful name, and her uncle Bernard had been willing. So Andalusia it now was. “I was in Milledgeville in the summer of 1947 with my mother,” says Frances Florencourt. “I remember Flannery was very happy, upbeat, smiling.” The hopeful twenty-two-year-old was in a good humor that season.

A POSTGRADUATE STUDENT on a fellowship, Flannery made independent living arrangements when she returned to Iowa City in September for her final year. As a teaching assistant, she was given an office in the Old Dental Building, next to University Hall, reserved for junior members of the English faculty. After looking at a number of boardinghouses, she settled on renting a single room in a big, gray, wood-frame house at 115 East Bloomington Street, owned by a Mrs. Guzeman. Like the boardinghouse of Haze Motes in Wise Blood, her new address was “clapboard . . . in a block of them, all alike.” And like Haze’s Mrs. Flood, her own “Mrs.” landlady, whom she surmised “was most a hundred then,” could be penurious. As she later groused, “Mrs. Guzeman was not very fond of me because I stayed at home and required heat to be on — at least ON. It was never UP that I remember. When it was on you could smell it and I got to where I warmed up a little every time I smelled it.”

On the opening day of the Workshop, she made friends with Jean Williams, a new student-writer from Indianapolis, who sat down in the seat beside her. “Flannery was sitting alone in the front row, over against the wall,” wrote Jean Williams Wylder. “She was wearing what I was soon to think of as her ‘uniform’ for the year: plain gray skirt and neatly-ironed silkish blouse, nylon stockings and penny brown loafers. Her only makeup was a trace of lipstick . . . there was something of the convent about Flannery that day — a certain intentness in the slight girlish figure which set her apart from the rest of us. She seemed out of place in that room composed mostly of veterans returned from World War II. Flannery was only 22 years old then, but . . . could easily have