I can’t tell you how old I was when I read Flannery O’Connor for the first time—I suspect somewhere around eleven or twelve. My great aunt, who taught school for almost sixty years, had a large collection of books—she heard O’Connor speak at East Texas State University (now Texas A&M-Commerce) in 1962—and my guess is that whatever story it was came from her library. In Mrs. Landers’ eleventh-grade English class and twice again as an undergrad, I read “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” and in graduate school I read her novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away. In short, Flannery O’Connor has been part of my life for most of my life.