When I was rereading Homer’s The Odyssey, I noticed a curious fault in the hero—Odysseus falls asleep at the most inopportune times. At the start of his adventures, he dozes off when the ships are in sight of Ithaca, the pilgrim’s destination. Hoping that by overexerting…

In 1974, ten years after Flannery O’Connor died, Alice Walker visited O’Connor’s farm in Georgia. It was located minutes from the sharecropper shack where Walker had once lived. ­Walker had read O’Connor voraciously but put her stories away when she discovered other writers, whom she…

Sayers rises above the average mystery author in both style and profundity. Dorothy Sayers was a successful mystery novelist when she published Gaudy Night (1935), yet this novel is revered as the most literary of her fiction titles. She began publishing mysteries for the money. A struggling,…