After moving from town to town, Philip Nason and his family finally settle in a working-class neighborhood in Detroit. It's the summer of 1937, shortly after Philip turns eleven. A lonely child, he inhabits a world of daydreams, filling notebooks with his cartoon fantasies. He discovers he's unable to compete in the rough-and-tumble games that are a boy's rite of passage.
Then Philip meets Jeremiah Casey-bigger, older, stronger, better at games than everyone else, but somehow isolated by his exceptional abilities. In Philip, Casey finds a fellow dreamer and artist. Together, they try to make an animated movie, send cartoons to syndicates, and finally produce a neighborhood newspaper. As they attempt to join the ranks of Al Capp and other famous cartoonists, their aspirations conflict with the upheavals of sexual awakening, the pressures of working-class life, and the coming of World War II. The dreams of Philip survive, but those of his older friend and hero do not.
My Friend Casey evokes a lost time and place and traces, along a darkening landscape, the path of what may have been the last surge of American optimism.