This novel, narrated by Hodge Backmaker, tells of a world in which the South won the American Civil War, leaving the North in ruins.

Moore's other novels include Cloud by Day, in which a brush fire threatens a town in Topanga Canyon; Greener Than You Think, a novel about unstoppable Bermuda grass; Joyleg (co-authored with Avram Davidson), which assumes the survival of the State of Franklin; and Caduceus Wild (co-authored with Robert Bradford), about a medarchy, a nation governed by physicians.

His grandfather Joseph Solomon Moore (1821–1892) had been a successful German-born commission merchant and the statistician of the New York custom house, the author of several books on the tariff question and a friend of Carl Schurz.

His mother's second husband and Moore's stepfather was the noted German jazz band leader Julian Fuhs [de].

Moore appears in Rexroth's memoir An Autobiographical Novel as the mad bohemian poet/bookseller/science fiction writer "Bard Major".

Rexroth claimed that "Major" had been on the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Milwaukee and was expelled for Trotskyist deviationism, but the factual basis for this tale, if any, is obscure.

Starting in 1937, he participated in the Federal Writers Project of the WPA, where his friend Rexroth was an administrator in the San Francisco office.

During the 1940s, Moore wrote book reviews, articles and short stories for a number of magazines and newspapers, including Harper's Bazaar, the San Francisco Chronicle, Jewish Horizons, and The Nation.