Dave Hirsh is a cynical Army veteran and an occasionally published but generally unsuccessful pre-war writer, who winds up in his hometown of Parkman, Illinois after being put on a bus in Chicago while intoxicated.

Dave's return threatens this state of affairs, so Frank makes a fruitless stab at arranging respectability, introducing him to his friend Professor Bob French and his beautiful daughter Gwen, a schoolteacher (who are familiar with his writing).

Several young, aimless WWII veterans hang around Dave and Bama in Parkman's bars, joined by Wally Dennis, the boyfriend of Frank's daughter Dawn, and an aspiring writer himself.

Three girls who work at the town brassiere plant, Rosalie, Mildred, and Ginnie, also hang around the local bars and are sexually available to Dave and his group of friends.

Frank schemes to buy farmland outside of town that will be used to build a highway bypass around Parkman, and fulfills plans to develop the land into a shopping center and motel.

Orville Prescott of The New York Times called it "a fictional disaster, clumsily written, crudely repetitious, ineptly unconvincing in many scenes, cheaply vulgar throughout.

"[5] David Sanders of The Washington Post was somewhat more positive, writing that while "A 1266-page novel inevitably reveals a whole catalogue of the writer's weaknesses ... Jones' strengths are genuinely impressive nevertheless.

Due to frequent "misspelled" words and punctuation errors, critics were generally harsh, not recognizing that such elements were a conscious style choice by Jones to evoke the provincialism of the novel's characters and setting.

[citation needed] The book was adapted into a 1958 American film directed by Vincente Minnelli and starring Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Shirley MacLaine.