The Present Year: 1956

The immediate present spans the late spring, summer, and fall of 1956 in the fictional plains village of Gilead, Iowa. Through these months, the narrator, Reverend John Ames, who turns seventy-seven in early fall, keeps a journal in which he writes a series of letters to his son, who is not yet seven. The narrator hopes that as a grownup, the son will read this book and come to know the man his father was. The narrator is dying of heart disease, and while he is able, he wants to commit this personal history to paper as a legacy for his son.

Writing about himself causes the narrator to examine his private feelings, his religious beliefs, the role sermon writing has played in his life as a minister, his study of the Bible and various philosophical and psychological questions he has been unable to resolve. As...