Writer Daphne Athas reveals a time when the eponymous college town was and wasn't the Southern part of heaven. This narrative traverses the twentieth-century milestones—the Depression, World War II, the McCarthy hearings, the transformation of the public university into the juggernaut of the New South's technocracy. She traces the town's literary heritage as well as generations of local mysteries and murders. She infuses this history with a local population of writers, red-baiters, philosophers, orphans, revolutionaries, and landlords. When Athas and her newly poor family crash-landed in Chapel Hill during the Depression, they settled into life on the other side of the tracks. From that perspective, the precocious, highly educated, teenaged Athas honed her abilities to uncover and dissect myth and secrets to create a chronicle that distills truth from lore. Athas writes of the artists and thinkers who came to Chapel Hill—Betty Smith, Richard Wright, Gertrude Stein, Paul Green, Zora Neale Hurston, Horace Williams, Clifford Odets, William Faulkner, even Ava Gardener make appearances. The famous and notorious intermingle with local characters. The Athas family's idiosyncratic journey is the key to a story of unparalleled discovery and wonder. Daphne Athas is an award-winning writer. Her novel, Entering Ephesus, was named one of Time Magazine's best books of 1971. She has written numerous other books and is the two-time winner of the Sir Raleigh Award. She taught in the Creative Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1968 until 2009. She lives in Carrboro, next door to the very house she describes building in Chapel Hill in Plain Sight.