An Unfinished Season captures the postwar moment of the 1950s, a time of rabid anticommunism, worker unrest, and government corruption.
In rural Quarterday, on the margins of Chicagos North Shore, nineteen-year-old Wilson Ravan watches as his fathers life unravels. Teddy Ravangruff, unapproachable, secure in his knowledge of the worldis confronting a strike and even death threats from union members who work at his printing business. Wilson, in the summer before college, finds himself straddling three worlds when he takes a job at a newspaper: the newsroom where working-class reporters find class struggle at the heart of every issue, the glittering North Shore debutante parties where he spends his nights, and the growing cold war between his parents at home. These worlds collide when he falls in love with the willful daughter of a renowned psychiatrist with a frightful past in World War II.

Ward Just won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the Society of American Historians for his novel A Dangerous Friend and was nominated for the National Book Award for Echo House. Just and his wife, Sarah Catchpole, divide their time between Martha's Vineyard and Europe.