In 1966, as a seminarian at the Virginia Theological Seminary, William H. Barnwell undertook a summer's missionary work at St. John's Episcopal Mission Center in his native city of Charleston, South Carolina. His supervisor was an African American priest, and Barnwell's duties ran the gamut from managing the recreation room to crisis intervention among the mission's clients and neighbours. In Richard's World is based on letters and journal entries that Barnwell kept throughout 1966, a year of social upheaval and civil rights unrest in Charleston. It was during this time that Barnwell encountered the ""Battle of Charleston"" within himself. His activist education began during that summer as he moved culturally and politically between white and black communities on the Charleston peninsula and served in a church known more for its members' elite pedigrees than for social action.

This Southern Classics edition includes a new introduction by the author that is part autobiography and part survey of the successes and failures of the civil rights movement in lowcountry South Carolina since In Richard's World was first published.