Elbert Hubbard visits the homes of authors, politicians, poets, philosophers and other prestigious people. If they are still living he speaks with them about their work. If they are dead he reflects on how their surroundings may have influenced them. These short essays are part biography, part interview and part pontification of Hubbard's opinion of the subject and their oeuvre.

In this volume he reflects on his own life, as well as on those of George Eliot, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, William E. Gladstone, J.M.W. Turner, Jonathan Swift, Walt Whitman, Victor Hugo, William Wordsworth, William M. Thackeray, Charles Dickens, Oliver Goldsmith, William Shakespeare and Thomas A. Edison.