A few years ago I ended my graduate studies in English. I had gone back to school, admittedly, not for pure scholarship, but to gain a sense of how American literature was truly “American.” For a long time before, I had assumed that European literature was, if not superior to its American counterpart, at least more sophisticated. But an interest in Flannery O’Connor, Jean Stafford, and many other American writers (Southern and otherwise) had eventually convinced me that there was a specialness to American literature. I thought it best to find out more about what had been thought and written on this side of the Atlantic for the past few hundred years.

I knew that upon formally undertaking study, I would be asked to take courses in English literature and language, and in critical theory. Naïvely, and willingly, I accepted those terms. Plodding through some ancillary courses seemed like a worthy enough trade-off for a two-year stint in the South, where I would spend my days reading, writing, and teaching at a place that had employed some of my favorite writers.

Thus I trekked south to the school near the banks of the Mississippi—to Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. I had been attracted there, in part, by the many eminent scholars and writers who had been associated with the school. I was reminded of them when I arrived by an essay that was anonymously placed in each graduate student’s mailbox. It was a reminiscence by Robert Heilman