The book offers a compact biography of Joseph Crosby Lincoln, tracing his upbringing in a seafaring Cape Cod village, familial maritime roots, and boyhood immersion in local landscapes and characters that later fueled his fiction. It recounts his early education, brief urban employments, and gradual literary success as a writer of wholesome, humorous tales rooted in coastal communities, and notes his popularity, public benefactions, and the ways his work preserves the manners and vernacular of an older Cape increasingly altered by modernization. The narrative blends biographical detail with assessments of themes and local color.