Few individuals have experienced as many facets of the oil industry or known as many of its important characters as J. Howard Marshall II. This autobiography details Marshall's career, from his days as a young law student writing about the problems of the oil industry for a prestigious law review, to his oil regulation days under FDR, to his work in some of the country's most important oil companies. In 1931, Marshall began his career on the "outside" of the industry investigating the legality of oil proration in articles for the Yale Law Review. In 1933, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes persuaded him to go to work for the government, which was then attempting to curtail petroleum overproduction.

No longer an outsider, Marshall coauthored the Code of Fair Competition for the Oil Industry in 1933 and drafted the Connally Hot Oil Act of 1935, the California State Lands Act of 1938, the Cole Pipeline Act of 1941, and the executive order creating the National Petroleum Council in 1946. Marshall's role as co-founder and chief counsel for the Petroleum Administration for War (PAW) in the early 1940s proved pivotal to coordinating the industry during wartime.

After World War II, Marshall worked for various oil-industry corporations. His list of associations and directorships demonstrates his long-term dedication to the industry.

Marshall's entertaining and detailed memories bring to life many of the most famous public and private characters of oil history. Unlike any work before it, Done in Oil recounts the history of the oil industry from the perspective of an individual who has known it, quite literally, inside-out, both as practitioner and as analyst. From the curious to the student of oil, business, and government history, readers will come away from this book having learned something new and significant about the oil industry and its culture.