City Life

In 1948, Flannery O’Connor was a guest at Yaddo, an artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs. In 1949, thanks to a McCarthy Era scandal involving Yaddo’s director, O’Connor suddenly found herself leaving with Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick for Manhattan. O’Connor lived there for nearly six months, first staying in Tatham House in Murray Hill, followed by months of renting a furnished room in Morningside Heights. By the fall of that year, O’Connor had followed Robert and Sally Fitzgerald to Redding, Connecticut, where she lived until December 1950. (From 1951 on, she lived in Milledgeville when not staying in an Atlanta hospital.) This chapter considers O’Connor’s time living in or visiting New York from 1948 through 1953, and describes time spent with (in addition to Lowell, Hardwick, and the Fitzgeralds), Elizabeth Fenwick, Robert Giroux, Margaret Sutton, and John and Dilly Thompson.