Born in the John Ross House in Rossville, Georgia, Charles Rice lived most of his boyhood at the foot of Missionary Ridge on the Tennessee-Georgia state line. Steeped in Cherokee culture and Civil War history, this area becomes a central metaphor in Rice's much-travelled life, a life touched by the Great Depression, tempered by World War II, and challenged by the revolutions that shaped postwar America. Through it all, Rice struggles to find an enduring truth greater than the shifting values of the society he so ably served.