Putnam begins the diary with her memories of her childhood and early life in Georgia and Arkansas. The daily entries begin in 1881, a few years after Putnam and her family moved to Pinal County, Arizona. Although the family owned a ranch and several mines, they were often in debt and moved back and forth between their ranch outside of Tucson, and the city of Tucson itself. While in Arizona, Putnam discusses in detail her personal and daily activities and the hardships she faced as the lone white woman in the area, as well as her contact with the Indians of the San Carlos Indian Reservation, including the Chiricahua, the Pima, and the Western Apaches. She mentions her fear of Indian raiding parties being lead by Chief Eskimizin. After the death of her husband in 1888, the family moved to Beaumont, California where her oldest son found a job with a railroad company. Putnam continued to travel to Tucson several times a year and finally moved to Los Angeles in 1894 where she was living when the diary ended in 1904.

One of America's great philosophers says the time has come to reform philosophy. Putnam calls upon philosophers to attend to the gap between the present condition of their subject and the human aspirations that philosophy should and once did claim to represent. His goal is to embed philosophy in social life.

Prior to the Civil War, publishing in America underwent a transformation from a genteel artisan trade supported by civic patronage and religious groups to a thriving, cut-throat national industry propelled by profit. Literary Dollars and Social Sense represents an important chapter in the historical experience of print culture, it illuminates the phenomenon of amateur writing and delineates the access points of the emerging mass market for print for distributors consumers and writers. It challenges the conventional assumptions that the literary public had little trouble embracing the new literary marketing that emerged at mid-century. The book uncover the tensions that author's faced between literature's role in the traditional moral economy and the lure of literary dollars for personal gain and fame. This book marks an important example in how scholars understand and conduct research in American literature.