A resident of Big Sur, CA, living in the log cabin around which the famous Nepenthe Restaurant is later built, Sergeant arranges for Henry Miller to live in Keith Evan's Partington Ridge Cabin while he is in the military. Sergeant suffers from ergophobia, working for years on a manuscript that is, unfortunately, destroyed by fire. She shows Miller many stories and novelettes with characters from New England, where she grows up, but set in Big Sur. She writes richly about bloodcurdling themes, not sparing her readers' emotions. Her writing reminds Miller of the South African Isak Dinesen. Sergeant holds that the Santa Lucia mountain range is hermaphroditic where they are feminine in form and contour, but masculine in strength and vitality.