Leon Edel Harper, 1985 740 pp. $24.95
Oliver Sacks
Summit, 1985
233 pp. $15.95
Peter H. Schuck_and Rogers M.
Smith. Yale, 1985. 173 pp. $22-:50
Jules Laforgue.
Translated by Willian Jay Smith. New
Directions, 1985. 160 pp. $8.95
David
Miller. Princeton, 1985. 479 pp. $9.95
(cloth, $32.50)
1920, auto registrations had jumped to eight million, one car for every 13 Americans.
WQ WINTER 1986
46
One hundred years ago, Germany's Carl Friedrich Benz patented an odd-looking three-wheeled vehicle powered a tiny gasoline engine. Most scholars agree that the Benz was the world's first automobile with a workable internal-combustion engine. Henry Ford's Model T came 22 years later. Starting before the First World War, the automobile would transform the United States, spawning a giant industry...
1907, when Edward Penfield painted this Manhattan scene, only 140,300 Ameri- cans had the inclination (and the money) to own a car. By 1920, auto registrations had jumped to eight million, one car for every 13 Americans.
WQ WINTER 1986
46
One hundred years ago, Germany's Carl Friedrich Benz patented an odd-looking three-wheeled vehicle powered by a tiny gasoline engine. Most scholars agree that the Benz was the world's first automobile with a workable internal-combustion engine. Henry Ford's...
1913, Scribner's Magazine was predicting that cars would bring "greater liberty, greater fruitfulness of time and effort, brighter glimpses of the wide and beautiful world," and "more health and happiness.. . . Thank God we live in the era of the motor car!"
More than any other people, Americans would embrace the automobile. Not just transportation, it became for many a status sym- bol, an alter ego, a key to personal autonomy. Cars crept into song ("Nothin' outrun my V-8...
rail but makes an acquaint- ance; he who runs road makes a friend-or sometimes an enemy; he at least gets intimate."
Despite his dark side (he dabbled in anti-Semitism), Ford, the visionary tin-kerer who was wont to pick up a hitch- hiker and give him a job, remains the most compelling automaker of them all. "It was useless to try to understand Henry Ford," wrote Charles E. ("Cast Iron Charlie") Sorensen in My Forty Years with Ford (Collier, 1962). "One had to sense...