John Martin Finlay (1941-1991) was born in Ozark, Alabama. Finlay received his Ph.D. in English from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge in 1980, the same year he converted to Roman Catholicism. Following the line of argument in the essay "Mere Literature and the Lost Traveller" by Allen Tate (1899-1979)-fellow southerner, poet-critic, and convert to Roman Catholicism-Finlay searched for, detected, and then subjected to an analysis...