Oil may be anywhere, but it doesn't belong to just anybody. In most countries it belongs to the government, but in the United States it belongs to the owner of the surface of the land under which it lies or to the speculator who may have purchased the land's "mineral rights."

As a lease man for a major oil company, Merlin F. Sailor's business was to secure for his company the right to conduct geophysical operations on, and drill for and produce, the oil and natural gas suspected to lie under the surface of the land. In this book he relates how he went about his work, which was alternately fun and frustrating. In the course of his work he met all kinds of people, some of whom wanted nothing to do with him or the oil industry. Although he claims that this book is intended to interest and amuse rather than instruct, it explains a great deal about oil along the way.

Sailor could and did tell a good story in this truly human document, and as a bonus, much of what he tells has genuine historical and literary value in the record of industrial America in the twentieth century.

Merlin F. Sailor (1906-1965) began his long association with the oil business in 1945, "after an uninteresting twelve years spent practicing law in Iowa, where there was no known oil or gas, and an extremely interesting three and one­half years in the U.S. Navy during World War II, where oil was always available but sometimes hard to get."