Flannery O’Connor is so thoroughly associated with the South that it is easy to forget that she spent much of her 20s in other parts of the country. After graduating from the Georgia State College for Women in Milledgeville in 1945, she spent two years in Iowa at the Writers’ Workshop; several months at Yaddo, the famous artists’ retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York; six months in New York City; and several months as a boarder in the Redding, Connecticut, home of the poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald and his wife, Sally, between 1949 and 1952. After she was diagnosed with lupus, and it eventually became clear she could no longer live on her own, she returned definitively to Milledgeville to live with her mother. 

In Flannery O’Connor’s Manhattan, Katheryn Krotzer Laborde takes a closer look at her relationship with New York City. Laborde argues that O’Connor’s “time in Manhattan was important to her development as both a person and a writer” and details the people she met there — like the Fitzgeralds and the editor Robert Giroux. 

O’Connor’s six-month stay in New York in 1949 was unplanned. She left Yaddo suddenly with Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick after Lowell accused Yaddo’s executive director, Elizabeth Ames, of harboring communist spies following an article in the New York Times that had linked a previous guest to a Soviet spy ring. The board closed Yaddo briefly to investigate.