opposes the over-scheduling of kids who are driven from one adult-led activity to another.

Author Pat Conroy's My Reading Life (Nan A. Talese, 2010) shows how people and books shaped his imagination. Conroy, author of The Lords of Discipline, The Great Santini, and other works, starts with his mother, from whom he received a love for words, stories, and books of all kinds. She was uneducated but well-read, haunting the library to satisfy her desire to plumb the secrets contained in books. She introduced him to Gone with the Wind when he was 5 years old, a novel that "set my mother's imagination ablaze when she was a young girl in Atlanta." From her identification with the book, "I absorbed my first lesson in the authority of fiction."

We seeof Look Homeward, Angel as one of the pivotal events of my life").

Children's first compositions should always receive praise, but adults need people who will offer them frank criticism. Conroy writes about the pitfalls facing successful writers who are surrounded by "moon-eyed groupies" when they lecture at colleges: "James Dickey walked into a cathedral of worshipers whenever he came to class. It was great for us, his students, but when I left class on the final day, I had real doubts it was good for him."

What fostered the imagination of Jane Austen, a clergyman's daughter whose books barely sold for decades after her death, and then became the inspiration for blockbuster movies and knock-off novels? In A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane