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Flannery was put up for her two-month summer residency on an upper floor of the mansion, along with most of the other twenty-three guests, including two composers, six painters, and fifteen writers. The coveted, rose-motif Tower Room that season went to Clifford Wright, an exuberant young Scandinavian American painter from Seattle, by way of Mott Street in lower Manhattan, who became friendly with her, noting in his June diary entry cataloging the arriving guests: “. . . and Flannery O’Connor who is a youngster working on her first novel.” Highsmith pegged her as “very quiet, stayed alone . . . while others of us were shockingly gregarious and unwriterlike.” A decade later, O’Connor was still passing along her favorable first impressions of Yaddo to Cecil Dawkins: “I really think you ought to look into the Yaddo business. The food is very good. The quarters are elegant. The servants are very nice. The scenery is magnificent.”

In a polished atmosphere of grandeur past, not unlike the Cline Mansion, though more ostentatious, Flannery descended the red-carpeted staircase each evening for dinner. With the other guests, she lingered in the Great Hall, an eccentric repository of Persian carpets, pink velvet sofas, a Tiffany chandelier and glass mosaic of a phoenix rising above the fireplace, oversized oil portraits of the Trasks, and a pair of painted sleighs, gifts of Queen Marie of the Netherlands. At six thirty, a silver bell rang and everyone passed across oiled hardwood floors and through velvet drapes, to be seated around a carved Tudor table with high-backed, dark oak chairs, the Trasks’ silverware glinting from sideboards. The dress code was jacket-and-tie for men and evening wear for women.

Presiding at the head of the table was Elizabeth Ames, the director of Yaddo since its first season, when she was appointed by Mrs. Trask’s second husband, George Peabody. A widowed schoolteacher from Minnesota, Mrs. Ames affected an imperious, affable air. “She is like a well-meaning early Hanoverian king — but she’s a liberal and doesn’t approve of kings,” commented Robert Lowell, a guest during the summer of 1947. She was also half-deaf, and recycled stories. The novelist Frederick Morton, in residence with O’Connor, recalls someone telling a story that summer about the Hollywood actor Monty Woolley. Mrs. Ames caught his name, and retold exactly the same gossip. “There was the same laughter, mostly staged,” says Morton. “Everybody was very scared of her, because she had a decisive voice in who would be invited.”

Equal parts Mother Superior and monarch, Mrs. Ames ran Yaddo with many of the strict rules of a convent, except for chastity — though spouses were discouraged from visiting. This regimen was made to order for Flannery, who suddenly found herself in a world where at least some others, like her, worked “ALL the time.” Following breakfast, the guests were handed a black tin workman’s lunchbox and thermos, and sent off to their studios. Those favored by the kitchen staff sometimes found an extra raw carrot. “I would have been happier writing in my room,” O’Connor said, “but they seem to think it proper you go to a studio.” A great silence, straight out of the Rule of St. Benedict, was imposed from nine until four in the afternoon, with no visiting or talking among guests allowed, and invitees were restricted to the hours of four to ten at night.

Flannery made her way each morning down a dirt road, through the pinewood, most likely to Hillside Studio, built in 1927 as a piggery but never used for that purpose. Instead its hearth and chimney, constructed for smoking hams and curing sides of bacon for Yaddo meals, qualified the outdoor wooden studio as one of the more desirable, along with Meadow Studio to its east, with views all the way across the Hudson Valley to the Green Mountains of Vermont. O’Connor remembered her cottage for June and July simply as “a long single room with a fireplace and chaise longue and a couple of tables and straight