Scholarly disciplines are historical reservoirs riven with contradictions. Often unaware of their own history, the humanities lead in complications, with English departments outpacing other fields of study. Both writing and English language and literature studies exhibit long-standing omissions and conflicts. This essay explores their similarities and differences, emphasizing the centrality of literacy--both reading and writing--to these concerns. These are elements of what I identified in 1979 as "the literacy myth." They are often central across fields, disciplines, departments, and today cross-campus initiatives. However counterintuitive it may seem, serious interest in the fundamental human activities of writing and reading, in necessary relationship with each other, is among the common major missing links in the subfields of English. To a historian of literacy, I emphasize that lack of attention to the inseparable actions of writing as a form of expression and reading as mode of understanding marks writing studies and history of English language. It is empirically, theoretically, and logically impossible to study or comprehend one without the other. Writing and reading are inseparably interrelated. This essay begins an interrelated critique and proposal for change. These fundamental connections are clear from studies of traditional classics through the present in English and English translation. We cannot understand either the production or the consumption of writing and printing, the making of meaning(s) itself, without central attention to literacy, that is, reading and writing especially taken together. What I first defined as the literacy myth continues to stand as both cause and consequence of this persisting gap in approaches and understanding.