A fragile Kansas girl's love for a handsome young man from the town's most powerful family drives her to heartbreak and madness.

It's 1928 in oil rich southeast Kansas. High school seniors Bud Stamper and Deanie Loomis are in love with each other. Bud, the popular football captain, and Deanie, the sensitive soul, are "good" kids who have only gone as far as kissing.

Unspoken to each other, they expect to get married to each other one day. But both face pressures within the relationship.

Bud has the urges to go farther despite knowing in his heart that if they do that Deanie will end up with a reputation like his own sister, Ginny Stamper, known as the loose, immoral party girl, and Deanie who will do anything to hold onto Bud regardless of the consequences.

They also face pressures from their parents who have their own expectation for their offspring. Bud's overbearing father, Ace Stamper, the local oil baron.

He does not believe Bud can do wrong and expects him to go to Yale after graduation, which does not fit within Bud's own expectations for himself.

And the money and image conscious Mrs. Loomis just wants Deanie to get married as soon as possible to Bud so that Deanie will have a prosperous life in a rich family. When Bud makes a unilateral decision under these pressures, it leads to a path which affects both his and Deanie's future.

A boy and a girl from different backgrounds fall in love regardless of their upbringing - and then tragedy strikes.

The love story of young adults Oliver Barrett IV and Jenny Cavilleri is told. Oliver comes from an extremely well off and old money New England family, the Barrett name which holds much gravitas and which is plastered especially all over Harvard.

Like those before him, he plans on attending Harvard Law School, which is not an issue in either the school not accepting him or he not wanting to attend. He has an extremely stiff relationship with his parents, especially his father, Oliver Barrett III, who loves his son in the old school way.

Jenny, a music student at Radcliffe, comes from a working class Rhode Island background, she working her way through the program before she plans on going to Paris to further her studies. Unlike Oliver's relationship with his father, Jenny has a very casual one with her baker father, Phil.

When Oliver and Jenny meet, there are immediate fireworks - she always with a quick quip to put him in his place - both of a good and bad kind, but they both quickly come to the realization that they are in love with each other.

They have many obstacles to overcome in having a committed relationship. His father's disapproval of someone like her arguably is the biggest. However, other things that happen in the natural course of life and death may trump all.