This volume of John Sanford's autobiography begins on November 21, 1951, when he and his wife, Marguerite Roberts, began a 9-year period on the blacklist.

John Sanford juxtaposes reminiscence with documentary material on earlier American heroes and heroines to build an impressive mosaic of the past, giving back full multi-dimensional vividness to history by returning it to the intimate field of experience, registered through his unique prose construction method: that elusive quality of vanished time which he himself has aptly termed "the color of the air.