1910. The piney woods of south Georgia. Adam Atwell, a black man, struggles to save the widow Lucy Hightower and her family from financial ruin. As the family's overseer, his business partnership pits him agains bankers and speculators out to steal the Hightower land. Adam faces the specter of Jim Crow, even murder, in his quest to save Lucy's legacy to her children. In turn, she wrestles with her desire to return to her family and an old sweetheart in Charleston or remain in the Georgia hinterlands raising her three children alone. Brainard Cheney (1900-1989) published four novels in his lifetime, all set in the south Georgia land of his youth. He later attended VAncerbilt in Nashville and became part of the 1920s and 1930s literary scene, a friend of Robert Penn Warren, Caroline Gordon, Allen Tate and Flannery O'Connor. Many consider THIS IS ADAM as his most fully-realized work.