The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands.
And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.
—Flannery O’Connor, writing in her essay “Total Effect and the Eighth Grade,” which appeared in the posthumous collection Mystery and Manners (1969). O’Connor was born 100 years ago in Savannah, though she is most associated with the Georgia town of Milledgeville, where she moved in 1938. Her work includes two collections of stories—A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge—and the novels Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away.
