The first-person narrator, Landon Carter, is 57 years old on April 12, 1999; however, as he walks through Beaufort, his North Carolina town, he is taken back to his 17-year-old self and the life-changing year, which he remembers “down to the smallest details” (1). Directly addressing the reader, Landon warns that “first you will smile, and then you will cry” (2).

Landon, who is growing up in Beaufort, a small, church-going North Carolina town, hails from an infamously prominent family. His grandfather, “a true bastard if there ever was one” (11), made the family fortune through illegal sales of rum during the Prohibition era and then in his banking business, Carter Banking and Loan, which charged wildly unfair interest rates during the worst period of the Depression. Landon’s father, Worth Carter, who is a Congressman and part of the government department that cracks down on alleged Communist activities, is a “bigwig” in town, though largely absent from Landon’s life given that he lives in Washington D.C. nine months of the year. Lacking a “manly influence,” Landon is a mildly rebellious teen, soaping up car windows and eating peanuts in graveyards at night.