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the other students regrouped for beers at the Brown Derby, a hangout on Dubuque Street. But Jean Williams turned to Clyde McLeod, unsatisfied. “For once there was not going to be any critical dissecting,” Jean Williams Wylder has written. “That we had said nothing about Flannery’s story was a tribute to her genius. But, the other girl writer and I wanted there to be something more — some more tangible token of our admiration. We went around Iowa City on that late spring afternoon, walking into people’s yards as if they were public domain, to gather arms full of flowering branches — taking only the most beautiful — and we carried them up to Flannery.”

Chapter Five

Up North

Arriving on the first of June for her stay at Yaddo, located on the outskirts of Saratoga Springs, near the Adirondack region of upstate New York, Flannery found herself among a crush of summer invitees on overlapping two-week to two-month residencies. Many had taken the morning train from New York City, reaching the local station at around four in the afternoon. Courtesy Cab Company then offered a special fifty-cent rate for the short ride past ornate hotels, once catering to visitors “taking the waters” in the nineteenth-century spa town; a string of Edwardian and Victorian mansions on Union Avenue; and the Saratoga Race Course for thoroughbreds, with its low fences and practice tracks, bordering the estate of Jock Hay Whitney as well as the grounds of the artists’ colony.

“It did not take Georgia for me to appreciate Yaddo,” Flannery joked that summer of the four-hundred-acre estate, arrived at by passing between stone pillars and driving down a long, curving road lined by tall evergreens and occasional ponds. Better preparation for appreciating the rarefied style of Yaddo might have been her early favorite, Edgar Allan Poe, rumored to have written “The Raven” on a lower lake during a visit to the property in the 1840s. For looming on a piney mountain ridge, surrounded by dark woods, formal rose gardens, fountains, and rockeries, was a fifty-five-room, turreted, late-Victorian, stone mansion, as Gothic as anything Poe imagined. Built by the stockbroker Spencer Trask and his wife, Katrina, in 1893, along with sixteen outlying buildings, the puzzling name of the estate was first lisped by one of their four children to rhyme with “shadow.”

By the time Flannery arrived in the summer of 1948, Yaddo had been open for creative business since 1926, bequeathed by Katrina Trask, who outlived her husband and all her children, as a center for “creating, creating, creating.” Earning his keep as a summer assistant during the early thirties, the novelist John Cheever later credibly claimed, for the acreage, “more distinguished activity in the arts than any other piece of ground in the English-speaking community, or perhaps in the entire world.” Guests walking across the sloped lawn in just its first two decades included the poets Louise Bogan, Langston Hughes, and Delmore Schwartz; the critics Philip Rahv and Lionel Trilling; the philosophers Hannah Arendt and Sidney Hook; the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson; the novelists Paul Bowles, James T. Farrell, and Jean Stafford; and the composers Virgil Thomson and Aaron Copland, who wrote his “Piano Variations” in the Stone Tower on Lake Spencer.

Like the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Yaddo had recently been hosting a Southern renaissance. Katherine Anne Porter shared a chicken dinner with her fellow guest Eudora Welty — and had the dubious pleasure of finding Carson McCullers stretched across her doorway in the main mansion, professing undying love, as she simply stepped over her admirer on the way to dinner. Porter was so taken with the place that she soon bought South Hill Farm nearby. During the summer of 1946, Truman Capote was ensconced in Katrina Trask’s uppermost Tower Room, with its ornate Gothic tracery windows, writing his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms. Following Capote’s suggestion to apply for a Yaddo fellowship, the Texas-born Patricia Highsmith had arrived in mid-May, coinciding with