English Professor Clyde Griffin's job is miserable, as are most of the people alongside whom he works. His college is third-rate, and except for a few friends and a woman whom he likes, all of the other English professors are bores. Asa Kelly is his only real friend, and to keep themselves alive, they have concocted a neat little hoax. They have made up a man, Howard Parker Montcrief, whom they have decided is a transitional figure, one who lives at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century and is intimate with all of the late Victorian writers and thinkers. At first, they content themselves with using discussions of Montcrief to make their colleagues uncomfortable and insecure, but one day, Asa has an idea. Why not, they think, go further? Clyde begins to compile an edition of poems by "Montcrief," and fudge some of his old papers so that they appear to be written about the man. In the meantime, drama builds in the department — another lecturer concocts a story that Clyde has been behaving inappropriately with the staff, and holds it over his head as an important vote on department policy approaches. In fact, Asa tells him, it could cost him his job. So Clyde leans into his Montcrief plans, and it works — his book and papers are accepted, and he will speak at the annual MLA conference. Needless to say, he is terrified. As he sits in a bar before the talk, all he wants is to go home.