Enduring Chills (60Th Anniversary - Flannery O'connor Issue) (Essay‪)‬

In a photograph taken during her first year at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, Flannery O'Connor poses on the steps of her graduate student dormitory. At her feet, snow piles in thick drifts, perhaps the first snow the Georgia native has ever seen. She wears a long winter coat over a black skirt and a sweatshirt emblazoned with a bulldog, a scarf tied around her head. She smiles vibrantly, eyes half blinking. The woman pictured on the dust jacket for O'Connor's first novel, Wise Blood, published five years later, looks solemn, all eagerness gone. Dressed in a black suit jacket, she glares into the camera, mouth closed, lips slightly crooked. Her short hair gathers thin and lifeless at her neck; she's visibly balding, puffy and moon faced, evidence of prolonged exposure to steroids. The year before the book's release, she'd been diagnosed with lupus, the disease that had killed her father.