The reader of this rollicking novel, first published in 1962, accompanies forty-seven-year-old Professor Arnold Soby (regarded by his girl students as safe and acceptable, but also good fun) on a sabbatical voyage to Italy and Greece. Among Soby's shipboard companions are Miss Winifred Throop, retired head mistress of the Winnetka Country Day School; her companion and colleague, Miss Mathilde Kollwitz, teacher of French and German; and Miss Thropp's seventeen-year-old niece, Cynthia Pomeroy, beautiful, scatterbrained, and studiously vulgar. Standing off the challenges of Italian and Swiss rivals, Soby pursues Cynthia through the waterways and plazas of Venice, the hills of Corfu, the ruins of Athens, and aboard the tiny, rolling, pitching tub Hephaistos in Greek waters. As is characteristic of Wright Morris's fiction, the real story develops beneath the surface of the brilliantly entertaining narrative.

One of the most distinguished American authors, Wright Morris (1910-1998) wrote thirty-three books including The Field of Vision, which won the National Book Award.

"A triumph of Dickensian grotesquerie, of riotous set pieces, and of memorable—even incredible—characters. . . .The book is crammed with incident and with finely drawn minor characters. But the focus of the novel is on Soby, Miss Throop, Miss Kollwitz, and Cynthia—and these stylized portraits ought to last in American fiction."—Library Journal