In this essay, the author explains not only how she came to write her classic text "Literature as Exploration," but she also describes the path of her own professional journey. A conviction about the difference between "literary" and other reading led to her writing "Literature as Exploration" in the first place. In this book, she argued that literature involves a transaction between the reader, the writer, and the text. The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) became the professional organization to which she mainly devoted her energies over the next half-century--because she felt that the teaching of English to all the people was of paramount importance, an importance that few of her "liberal arts" university colleagues recognized or felt to be their concern. Over the years, she found herself involved in many NCTE committees, commissions, conventions, and publications. In these days of articulate minority voices, she especially recalls editing the June 1946 issue of the "English Journal," devoted to furthering the concept of cultural pluralism set forth in "Literature as Exploration."