'Man In Debt' is a novella-length piece in fourteen chapters. Largely in correspondence form, it concerns a battle involving a wily borrower, his lender and their two firms of lawyers. The principals move from hostility to quasi-friendliness. Their legal representatives go the opposite way, with farcical results.
Commissioner Sanders is called upon by the British Government "to keep a watchful eye upon some quarter of a million cannibal folk, who ten years before had regarded white men as we regard the unicorn." Written when world powers were vying for colonial honor, Sanders of the River encapsulates the beliefs and assumptions that motivated such quests. There is religious palava, raiding palava, and all the while, Bosambo, magnificent chief of the Ochori, watches on.
Elfrida Bell feels stifled in her small hometown of Sparta, Illinois. All the townspeople, except her dear mother, expect poor Elfrida to marry and live her life as a housewife. Elfrida, however, has other plans. She's too smart to waste her talent in the home the way her mother did. And so she runs away to Europe hoping to find a career as a journalist.
