KEN, a short story, was published in The New Yorker Magazine in 1959. The script is based on that short story and tells the true account of a nightmarish train ride the writer took in 1933 while he was a student at the Yale Drama School. When a fellow student dies, he is elected - under pressure - to take the boy’s body back to his parents’ home in Portland, Oregon. The action centers around his trip, the funeral and the events that changed Arnold’s life.