After having survived the first quarter century of my life in the coalfields of western Pennsylvania, I escaped into a career as a legal officer in the U.S. naval service from which I retired in 1994. Then, when I quickly discovered that retirement was very much over-rated, I moved into the university classroom as an instructor of literature, English composition, drama, and script analysis.
When in the classroom, I try to persuade reluctant undergraduates that reading Homer, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Flannery O'Connor, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, and hundreds of other canonical authors (or, for that matter, any good book by any contemporary writer) is a far better use of life's rather limited time than hours spent in front of video games while listening to Eminem, Fifty Cent, Ludacris, and others among their very much over-rated pop-culture species. Students in my classes ever since I began teaching in 1999 have graciously endured my antics and obsessions, and I hope they have been positively influenced by my maniacal passion for reading.
And when not in the classroom, I am most often found trying to relax on the hurricane-prone Gulf coast at my home which I share with my nearly perfect wife, our less-than-perfect one-eyed miniature dachshund, and - of course - plenty of books.
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