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. It's a piece
of history--especially so because its flaking skin conceals a rare
asset: a complete provenance, stretching back more than fifty years.
So, hassled by a growing assortment of challengers, the Chevy's
thirteenth owner--an orphan, grade-school dropout and rounder, a felon
arrested seventy-odd times, and a man who's been written off as a ruin
himself--embarks on a mission to save the car and preserve long record
of human experience it carries in its steel and upholstery.
Written for both gearheads and Sunday drivers, Auto Biography charts
the shifting nature of the American Dream and our strange and abiding
relationship with the automobile, through an iconic classic and an
improbable, unforgettable hero.
