[1][2] It is set at a fictional Connecticut prep school in the early 1940s and relates the coming of age of a group of mainly WASP boys who at the same time prepare themselves if half-heartedly, to go to war immediately after graduation.

The school, modeled on Yates' own experiences as an adolescent at Avon Old Farms School, is called Dorset Academy, a small private institution dependent on its now senile founder, a wealthy older woman named Abigail Church Hooper, a thinly-veiled reference to Avon Old Farms founder Theodate Pope Riddle.

Dorset Academy is at best a second-rate institution, having the reputation of an unusual sort of prep school, where many of the students are on scholarship, and Dr. Stone, the English master, is the only "Harvard man".

In the "Foreword", the first person narrator, 15-year-old William Grove, a stand-in for Yates, relates what makes his divorcée mother, decide on Dorset Academy for her son.

When, toward the end of the novel, it is announced that Dorset Academy will have to close due to mounting debt, Draper decides to hang himself in his chemistry lab in humiliation.