Abel and Janice meet at a school for the deaf. Sign language brings them together, enabling them to survive and, indeed, to forge a love too powerful to be broken by the world into which they were born. Spanning forty years, from the late 1920s to the early 1960s, In This Sign follows the lives of Abel, Janice, and their hearing daughter, Margaret, as they contend uneasily with the “Outside”—a world designed, often purposely, to be inhospitable to those like them. First published in 1970, only a decade after ASL’s formal recognition as a language and well before the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, In This Sign stands out as a rare, compassionate portrait of the deaf community.