Daniel Lusk's memoir, Girls I Never Married, begins in Iowa at the end of the Great Depression. He was born to devoutly religious parents who "were renters and debtors, the working poor." Like many writers of his generation, his life and his writing developed against the backdrop of unrest and amid the struggle for cultural change in America - Civil Rights and Vietnam, the women's movement, communes, sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll - during the latter half of the 20th century. In Girls I Never Married Lusk shares his narrative dowry from mid-western preacher, rancher, and jazz singer to New England professor, poet, and minister of words.