The play stages the life of a short-story writer serving a prison sentence, showing his daily work as a night drug-clerk and his use of imagination to transform prison incidents into fiction. Four acts alternate realistic scenes in the penitentiary with dreamlike vignettes enacted under colored lighting that represent stories birthed in his mind. Fellow inmates, a trusty, and an ex-bandit figure in his recollections and conversations as he wrestles with longing, memory, and creative compulsion. Interwoven dramatizations of short stories illustrate how lived experience, temptation, and companionship are reframed by artistic temperament, tracing the writer's effort to sustain creativity and dignity within confinement.