On a wild winter night in the Ozarks, a tiny baby was traded for a race horse worth $300. The frail child soon proved the sum was not too great, for he began to learn before he could walk. Later he cooked, washed, ironed, even taught himself to knit, and through this woman's work he was able to earn an education. Little George Carver had green fingers, too, and brought many a sickly plant back to healthy bloom.

Then young Carver went West and became a homesteader. After college, he was teaching at Iowa State University when a speech by Booker T. Washington changed his life.

In a laboratory of makeshifts and castoffs, with only thirteen students, Professor Carver began his great work at Tuskegee Institute. Slowly, through his discoveries about the peanut and the sweet potato, this man changed the life of a people and a region. Famous men were honored to count him as a friend, and from all over the world came letters to this patient genius who never stopped learning in his eighty years.

Surpassing even his discoveries was the gentle example of this dedicated missionary, who set a better pattern for all races. He never had time for resentment of slurs and ill treatment by the ignorant.

This biography, peculiarly American, is told in lyric prose that is itself a tribute to one of America's greatest sons.

From the dust jacket