About this item
A brilliant blend of Shop Class as Soulcraft and The Orchid Thief, Earl Swift's wise, funny, and captivating Auto Biography follows an outlaw auto dealer as he struggles to save a rusted '57 Chevy - a car that has already passed through twelve pairs of hands before his - while financial ruin, government bureaucrats and the FBI close in on him.Slumped among hundreds of other decrepit hulks on a treeless, windswept moor in eastern North Carolina, the Chevy evokes none of the Jet Age mystique that made it the most beloved car to ever roll off an assembly line. It's open to the rain. Birds nest in its seats. Officials of the surrounding county consider it junk.To Tommy Arney, it's anything but: It's a fossil of the twentieth-century American experience, of a place and a people utterly devoted to the automobile and changed by it in myriad ways.
About the Author
Longtime journalist Earl Swift is the author of the forthcoming ACROSS THE AIRLESS WILDS: THE LUNAR ROVER AND THE TRIUMPH OF THE FINAL MOON LANDINGS, due from HarperCollins in July 2021. He is also the author of seven other books, among them the New York Times best seller CHESAPEAKE REQUIEM (HarperCollins, 2018) , the story of an island town threatened with extinction by the very water that has sustained it for 240 years; AUTO BIOGRAPHY (HarperCollins, 2014) , a narrative journey through postwar America told through a single old car and the fourteen people who've owned it; THE BIG ROADS (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011) , an armchair history of the U.S. highway system and its effects, physical and cultural, on the nation it binds; JOURNEY ON THE JAMES (University of Virginia Press, 2001) , about a great American river and the largely untold history that has unfolded in and around it; WHERE THEY LAY (Houghton Mifflin, 2003) , for which he accompanied an Army archaeological team into the jungles of Laos in search of a helicopter crew shot down thirty years before; and a 2007 collection of his stories, THE TANGIERMAN'S LAMENT (UVa Press) . He also co-authored, with Macon Brock, ONE BUCK AT A TIME (Beachnut/John F. Blair, 2017) , an insider's account of Dollar Tree's rise from loopy idea to retail juggernaut. Since 2012 he's been a fellow of Virginia Humanities at the University of Virginia. He lives in the Blue Ridge mountains west of Charlottesville.
