Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), the most important and influential of the classical American philosophers, is credited as the inventor of the philosophical school of pragmatism. The scope and significance of his work have had a lasting effect not only in several fields of philosophy but also in mathematics, the history and philosophy of science, and the theory of signs, as well as in literary and cultural studies.

Inspired by his friendship and correspondence with the novelist Walker Percy, who himself was absorbed by the life and writings of Peirce, Ketner adopts a narrative strategy that lets Peirce tell his own early life story. He weaves the voluminous components of an intellectual biography that are scattered throughout Peirce's published and unpublished writings into a novelistic account that reads like a mystery.

Ketner offers satisfying explanations and convincing hypotheses for a number of intimate and controversial aspects of Peirce's eventful yet frustrated life, including his inability to find a permanent teaching position at any university, the ancestry of Peirce's wife Juliette and the source of his family's hostility toward her, and the previously unknown fact that Peirce actually had three wives instead of two.