Robert Young Drake, Jr., was born on October 20, 1930, in Ripley, Tenn. He graduated from Vanderbilt University with a bachelor's (1952) and a master's (1953) in English. Then he obtained a master's (1954) and PhD (1955) in English from Yale University, where he met Cleanth Brooks. He then taught at various universities over the United States until he came to the University of Tennessee in 1965, when he published his first collection of stories, Amazing Grace (reprinted 1981). He befriended Flannery O'Conner and published a booklet "Flannery O'Connor, The True Country" in 1966. Drake served as editor and chairman of the 1969 Southern Literary Festival and published its proceedings, titled The Writer and His Traditions. Some other publications include The Single Heart (1971), The Burning Bush (1975), Survivors and Others (1987), and What Would You Do For an Encore? And Other Stories (1996). Drake passed away in 2001.

Flannery O'Connor was an American writer and essayist. O'Connor wrote two novels and 32 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. Many of her works reflected her strong Roman Catholic faith. She was born in Savannah, Georgia, on March 25, 1925, to Regina Cline and Edward F. O’Connor. At the age of fifteen she lost her father to lupus. She attended Georgia College and State University and in 1945 graduated from an accelerated three year program in Social Science. In 1946, she was accepted into the Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa; it was there she began studying Journalism. She never married, relying for companionship on her correspondence and close relationship with her mother, Regina Cline O'Connor. In 1951, like her father, she was diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematous and returned to Georgia. She died on August 3, 1964, at the age of 39, of complications from lupus.