This is the story of Benjamin Reuben, a junior member of a large and highly uneducated family lodged in one of the more sterile regions of Alabama. Before The Great War (1914-1918), he acquired a woman and a parcel of farmland through forced marriage. Adept at nothing but spelling, blessed and burdened by a poetic imagination but starved of culture, the young insomniac toiled sedulously for years, doing most of his plowing at night. Finally, to save his farm, he became a rural postman. At last in old age he and the woman drifted on down to the Edge of the world, a small distance from their tattered house. He died thinking himself a failure by worldly reckoning, overlooking his six children and growing brood of grandchildren, including one Lee Pefley, the preceptor of another Reuben who was destined to turn the world around.