Shortly after a 1954 U. S. Supreme Court ruling declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, a stranger arrives in Caxton — a small southern town peacefully awaiting the integration of its all-white high school. Adam Cramer, a polite, threateningly smooth-talking young Northerner, has come to persuade this community to work against the new segregation laws. Within days, he stirs the white residents to violence in order to play his own personal power games. By the time he leaves town, mob action, riots, bombings, and attacks on integrationists had become commonplace, turning neighbor against neighbor, husband against wife, white against black. But The Intruder is more than just the story of one man and the trouble he brings. It is a portrait of a southern town in the mid-1950s, a novel dramatizing the problems of sociological change, civil rights, and the changing face of America.