Professor Broadus Moore has become disenchanted with what he sees as the deteriorating academic world in contemporary society and the corruption in city life. He retired from his professorship at Findlay University and is alone without family or close friends, despondent, and ailing from aches and pains he cannot understand. He lives the life of a bum in a seedy apartment he can hardly afford on his small stipend from an early retirement from the university he left, and he is essentially broke, having little money to buy food or to take care of himself. Once a Catholic, he fallen away to embrace atheism. Once a published poet of significance, he now suffers writer's block, despising his own poetic efforts and those of poets he once admired. Broadus Moore is troubled and wishes to be dead or in his words, "eternally asleep. "He seldom leaves his apartment except for the short times he goes to a restaurant in his section of the city to get a cup of coffee, and if he can afford it some scrambled eggs or chicken soup for his sour stomach. He loves Scotch whisky and smokes like a train. He hates no one and love no one until Tulip Smith, a former student of his, recognizes him and begins a torrid sexual affair that quickly seduces him to fall in love with her. He cannot understand why a pretty affluent young woman such as Tulip would be attracted to him, a grizzled up aging man that looks like a homeless bum, yet he becomes convinced the two of them are mutually madly in love with each other and does not suspect that Tulip has a dark agenda. It is that agenda that crushes and destroys Professor Broadus Moore but leads him back to reassess his earlier Christianity. The novel's tone is Dostoyevskian and reminiscent of Herman Hesse. The theme borders on existentialism, and the style is poetic and philosophical. The content includes depression, sex, love, betrayal, hypocrisy, blood, a brutal murder, and an execution.