The Inadvertent Epic is based on a five part radio broadcast of the 1978 Massey Lectures which were aired in October of that year as part of CBC's IDEAS series.

"I want to discuss the treatment of what seems to me now to be a kind of communal or co-operative prose epic, dealing with the war between the States, Reconstruction, and the Ku Klux Klan, as well as certain ethnic and sexual conflicts in America which helped motivate those political events and were in turn exacerbated by them."