Set in a Midwestern factory town during the summer of 1945, Where Summer Strives is the story of drunken literary scholar Harvey Sloane, who finds his way by accident to the town and to the white working-class neighborhood where he will make a series of fatal mistakes about the conduct of his life. It is also the story of eleven-year-old schoolboy Tobe Jackson, whose clear perception of his environment helps him to function within it but doesn't allow him to avert the disasters that await both Sloane and the family of his young black classmate, Sammy Tucker. At times shocking, at others hilarious, Where Summer Strives is serious-often brutally so-in its depiction of the lives of America's working class white poor in the closing days of World War II.