Classic tale of a man who sells his soul to the devil, based on Goethe's Faust and folk sagas.

To grow up in the 1950s was to enter a world of polarized national alliances, nuclear threat, and destabilized social hierarchies. Two world wars and the depression that connected them had unleashed a torrent of expectations and dissatisfactions―not only in global affairs but in American society and Americans’ lives. A privileged white girl in conservative, segregated Virginia was expected to adopt a willful blindness to the inequities of race...