The sixteen-year-old boy laughed with his friends as he approached an irrigation-ditch pool for a swim. But as Rudolfo Anaya dove into the water, "the world disappeared." When he finally came to, he could not move. "I felt a panic I had never felt before. Death was coming for me, and I could not move in protest. . . . I knew I was about to drown. But my instinct for survival had been sharpened too well for me to give up without a struggle. It was not my time to die."

The teen-aged Anaya was right--he would not die. Yet the accident and resulting paralysis, from which he eventually recovered, changed his life forever. As Anaya recalled in Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series (CAAS), it was this accident that made him "determined to do more than my more abled friends had ever done. I fished, scaled the mountains of Taos, hunted...