This book consists of seventeen chapters with each one devoted to an American radical. These include the Hopi Yukeoma, Dorothy Day, Alexander Berkman, John Woolman, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, William Lloyd Garrison, Henry David Thoreau, Mother Jones, Albert Parsons, John Peter Altgeld, Eugene V. Debs, Clarence Darrow, John Taylor, Bartolemeo Vanzetti, Malcolm X, and Helen Demoskoff.

But out of all these persons, it is perhaps the author himself who shines forth as first among those of whom he writes, in that Ammon Hennacy himself is the embodiment of the One-Man Revolution in America. But Ammon in truth may be more than that. For some men, it is their fate to play the role of archetype for lesser mortals. As it might be said that Carl Jung is the archetype of the wise old man, so we might say that the Christian anarchist and pacifist, Ammon Hennacy, with his penetrating vision into the chaos of our times, is the archetype of the prophet whom, like any prophet, we fail to heed at our own peril.