A grimly quiet poet who lives for several years at Anderson Creek, CA, O'Neill of necessity learns to be a carpenter, plumber, and mason. He supports his family by farming, fishing, and hunting, paints, mends his own clothes - and yet remains purposefully poor. He rejects the workaday world. He can talk about books like a professional lecturer and, being Irish, always has a new twist to his stories. He bears no hatred from his experiences as a prisoner of war, promises to write a great war novel some day, but never does. Instead, he produces pieces that fail to captivate readers the way his oral stories do and he is happy to idle away his time.