David Bartholomae has been a prominent figure in the field of composition and rhetoric for almost five decades. This is an end-of-career book, a collection of late essays that reflect on the teaching of reading and writing, on the challenges and value of students’ work, and on the place of English in the university curriculum. The chapters are unified by a thread that connects some of the books and ideas, people and places, students and courses that shaped and sustained his work as a scholar and teacher over time. Several chapters present and discuss extended examples of student writing. The essays trace his formation from the early days of “Basic Writing” to his final engagements with study abroad and travel writing, where he had the chance to think again, and in radically different settings, about the fundamental problems of communication across linguistic and cultural divides.

David Bartholomae is professor of English and the Charles Crow Chair of Expository Writing, emeritus, at the University of Pittsburgh. He has published widely on composition and teaching and was the 2014 Pennsylvania Professor of the Year. With Jean Ferguson Carr, he edits the Composition, Literacy, and Culture series at the University of Pittsburgh Press.