Set against a backdrop of Prohibition-era New York, The Small Bachelor is the story of a young man from the West who is trying to be an artist, an older man from the East who wants to be a Westerner, his daughter who does not want to marry an English lord, her stepmother who wants her to, a policeman who wants to become a poet, a writer of pamphlets who says he “can make a poet out of two sticks and a piece of orange peel” if they follow his instructions carefully, and a young woman from the West who has become a fortune-teller. There are also several other characters with other motives, and a number of coincidences which bring them all together in various constellations of absurdity which depict the human condition at its finest. (Summary by Zach Hoyt)