This book draws connections between Vermont author Howard Frank Mosher and works of classic American literature. Chapter I explores the horrors of the Civil War as conveyed in Mosher's Walking to Gatlinburg and Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. Major characters escape the battlefield and then feel a need to redeem themselves for what could be a cowardly act. Chapter II analyses how Mosher and three classic authors explore the physical and moral dangers of industrialisation, especially women's safety. Chapter III compares Mosher's Walking to Gatlinburg to Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress in terms of the quest for Heaven. In Chapter IV, Melville's novels are used to address evil as it appears in Mosher's Disappearances. Chapter V explores black men with white women in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and Mosher's A Stranger in the Kingdom. Humour is at the core of Chapter VI, comparing Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn to Mosher's The True Account. In Chapter VII, the disappearing wilderness is the issue in Faulkner's Go Down, Moses and several of Mosher's works. Chapter VIII offers romantic love as a shield against other human beings. A conclusion draws on Steinbeck, Twain and Mosher to elaborate on how one should explore as much of the world as possible.

From the 1920s through the 1950s, the center of black social and business life in Charlottesville, Virginia, was the area known as Vinegar Hill. But in 1960, noting the prevalence of aging frame houses and ""substandard"" conditions such as outdoor toilets, voters decided that Vinegar Hill would be redeveloped. Charlottesville's black residents lost a cultural center, largely because they were deprived of a voice in government. Vinegar Hill's displaced residents discuss the loss of homes and businesses, and the impact of the project on black life in Charlottesville. The interviews raise questions about motivations behind urban renewal.