Good Reasons

Lester Faigley holds the Robert Adger Law and Thos. H. Law Professorship in Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin. He was the founding director of the Division (now Department) of Rhetoric and Writing at Texas in 1993, and he later served as Director of the University Writing Center. He was the 1996 Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. Faigley has published over 30 books and editions, including Fragments of Rationality (Pittsburgh, 1992), which received the MLA Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize.


Jack Selzer has collaborated with colleagues at Penn State and elsewhere in all kinds of ways. With his long-time friend Lester Faigley, he has written two Pearson books, Good Reasons and Good Reasons with Contemporary Arguments, now in their 7th Editions, and he also has edited a number of versions of Conversations: Readings for Writing, currently in its 8th Edition (now edited by Dominic Delli Carpini). A Fellow of the Rhetoric Society of America, once a president of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing, and the creator of Penn State's innovative Paterno Fellows Program, he has published or edited a number scholarly articles and books, including Rhetorical Bodies (with Sharon Crowley), Kenneth Burke in the 1930s (with Ann George), and Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village. He enjoys teaching a first-year seminar on the rhetoric of the civil rights movement, and happens to be a charter member of the longest continuously running fantasy sports league on the face of the earth.