THE BRAND NEW York Times bestselling writer of Bitter Brew chronicles the birth and rise to greatness of the American auto industry through the remarkable life of Harley Earl, an eccentric six-foot-five, stuttering visionary who dropped out of college and went on to invent the profession of automobile styling, thereby revolutionized the way cars were made, marketed, and even imagined.

Harleys Earl’s story qualifies like a real American family saga. It started in the Michigan pine forest in the years about Fins: Harley Earl, the Rise of General Motors, and the Glory Days of Detroit following the Civil War, traveled over the Great Plains over the wooden wheels of a covered wagon, and finally settled inside a dirt street village called Hollywood, California, where young Harley took the skills he learned working in his father’s carriage store and applied them to designing modern, racy-looking automobile systems for the fast audience in the burgeoning silent movie business.

As the 1920s roared using the sound of mass manufacturing, Harley returned to Michigan, where, at GM’s invitation, he introduced art into the rigid mechanics of auto-making. Over another thirty years, he functioned as a kind of mixture Steve Jobs and Tom Ford of his time, redefining the form and function from the country’s leading product. His effect was serious. When he retired as GM’s VP of Design in 1958, Detroit reigned as the making capitol from the globe and General Motors ranked as the most successful firm in the annals of business.

Knoedelseder tells the story with techniques both large and small, weaving the history of the business with the history of Detroit as well as the Earl family members seeing that Fins examines the result of the auto on America’s economy, culture, and national psyche.