Leonard Michaels tells us that he began keeping a journal because he had no one to talk to about his troubled early marriage, which ended in his wife's suicide. Over the years, he reveals here, he has found many things easier to confide to paper than to friends and family. Now, with the publication of his journals, we follow this distinguished writer's progress.

Time out of Mind describes Michaels as friend, lover, husband, and father. With surprising dramatic intensity, it captures the character of the times, beginning in the early sixties, when he was a young writer living in Greenwich Village, and continuing through the political mayhem of the Vietnam era during his student days at Ann Arbor, then on into the seventies and eighties in Berkeley, where Michaels was for many years a professor of English literature.