Missing in Action was written in one month, on a farm on the Little Nemaha, in the summer of 1981, from notes contemporary with 1979 New York City. The work belongs to the genre established by Joyce, present in American Literature as The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, and Catcher in the Rye, the contemporary novel written in the time of its setting using the selective stream of consciousness of a first person observer to tell the story. It is the story of frontier inversion, of a famed generation putting itself up for sale in the slaving markets of the Big Apple, of a journey into the regenerations of primitivism, of the return of the West to the spawning grounds of the East, like one joins the French Foreign Legion, to escape and forget, a stray splash from the whirlpools of the dispersion occurring within American society after the Viet Nam War Era.