Tony Jason Stafford was born in a small, cotton textile-mill town on the outskirts of Charlotte. He came from a long line of uneducated, poor dirt farmers, while his immediate family were fanatical, church-going, Southern Baptist fundamentalist, and he spent a great part of his early life in church meetings of one kind or another. At an early age, he was persuaded to believe that he had been "saved" and a little later was told that God had called him to be a preacher. He played high school football and did all the things that high school teenage boys do in a small, provincial town, but what the general public did not know was that in his solitude he was an avid reader, enjoyed his English classes, and in his senior year took a course in the English Romantic poets, which opened up a new universe for him. After high school he played junior college football but soon realized that his time would be better spent trying to be a good student and went off to Wake Forest University as a pre-ministerial student to study philosophy in preparation for the seminary. Philosophy, in its search for truth, opened another universe for him. His spiritual crisis came in the summer between his junior and senior years when he was invited to be the student minister of a small Baptist mission and soon realized that being a minister was not for him and that God was calling him to be a "teacher," not a "preacher"--a simple misunderstanding in pronunciation. It was the same summer that he was surrounded by lots of female flesh as a life guard at a swimming pool. Today he holds a PhD from Louisiana State University and has been Professor of English at the University of Texas at El Paso for the last fifty years. He has written and had produced a dozen or so plays, in addition to a novel, and numerous scholarly articles and a book of G. B. Shaw entitled "Shaw's Settings: Gardens and Libraries", published by the University Press of Florida in Gainesville.