Edward von Behrer’s mother was surprised when he came home from his first day of school in tears. "They didn’t teach us to read today, and you promised they would. That's the only reason I went," he wailed. His cousins still talk—decades later—about the stories he spun during his summer visits to their home in Chicago a few years later. Obviously he was fated to write. That sort of thing seems to happen to a lot of Southern guys. Even those who fled the South ASAP.