On a cold, rainy night, an aging bachelor named George Ticknor prepares to visit his childhood friend Prescott, who has surprisingly become one of the leading intellecutal lights of their generation.

With a hastily baked pie in his hands, and a lifetime of guilt and insecurity weighting upon his soul, he reluctantly sets out for the Prescott's dinner party. As he stumbles toward this forbidding night, Ticknor, now a failure, thinks back on his acquaintence with Prescott, back to the small but perhaps monumental event that set the scales of their life permanently in Prescott's favour.

Distantly inspired by the real-life friendship between the great historian William Hickling Prescott and his estemmed biographer, Ticknor is a fantastical and often hilarious study of resentment -- the biting chronicle of a one-sided friendship.