In about a thousand pages, grouped in two parts, redrawing, over about twenty years, the slow and deep dissolution of an ordinary peasant family living in the village of Siliştea-Gumeşti (Teleorman), in the Wallachian Plain, Preda aimed to fulfil his credo ("without notions like history, truth, reality, prose would make no sense").
The debt, worsened by the low crop prices following the Great Depression in Romania is only the starting point of Ilie's turmoil: he, a respected figure in the village community, has to face not only the shame of fighting the tax collector but, in what is the actual drama, the incomprehension of his family.
Relevant pages describing Moromete make points against the "new society" credo of his youngest son Niculae, by now a young man sent to his own village by the Romanian Communist Party to carry out propaganda in favour of new collective farms.
Denying merit to communism and its goal to eliminate private land ownership and transform peasants into farm workers, Moromete dies proud of "having lived like an independent man".
If previous Romanian novels with similar themes (those of Ioan Slavici and Liviu Rebreanu) were centred on dramas involving acquiring plots, Moromeţii shifted focus on preserving ownership of the land.