The Life of Jack Gray

Jack Gray, born into a working-class, fundamentalist, and republican family, becomes an unbeliever as a college freshman, gets radicalized while a teaching assistant some years later, and bolts out of a librarian job and gets psychotic in San Francisco. Rebuilding his life, Jack suffers through a hellish library job, goes into exile in Eastern Washington, and there finally finishes his PhD. Up and abruptly down, Jack has no job, goes to Spokane, flees out of there to Seattle once more, and there, by means of welfare, manages to survive. He lives not precisely happily afterwards in Eastern Washington.