The Vagabonds, Jeff Guinn
The Vagabonds, Jeff Guinn
2 Rating(s)
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The Vagabonds
The Story of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison's Ten-Year Road Trip

Author: Jeff Guinn

Narrator: Josh Hamilton

Unabridged: 9 hr 34 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/09/2019


Synopsis

A “fascinating slice of rarely considered American history” (Booklist)—the story of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison—whose annual summer sojourns introduced the road trip to our culture and made the automobile an essential part of modern life.

In 1914 Henry Ford and naturalist John Burroughs visited Thomas Edison in Florida and toured the Everglades. The following year Ford, Edison, and tire maker Harvey Firestone joined together on a summer camping trip and decided to call themselves the Vagabonds. They would continue their summer road trips until 1925, when they announced that their fame made it too difficult for them to carry on.

Although the Vagabonds traveled with an entourage of chefs, butlers, and others, this elite fraternity also had a serious purpose: to examine the conditions of America’s roadways and improve the practicality of automobile travel. Cars were unreliable and the roads were even worse. But newspaper coverage of these trips was extensive, and as cars and roads improved, the summer trip by automobile soon became a desired element of American life.

The Vagabonds is “a portrait of America’s burgeoning love affair with the automobile” (NPR) but it also sheds light on the important relationship between the older Edison and the younger Ford, who once worked for the famous inventor. The road trips made the automobile ubiquitous and magnified Ford’s reputation, even as Edison’s diminished. The automobile would transform the American landscape, the American economy, and the American way of life and Guinn brings this seminal moment in history to vivid life.

About Jeff Guinn

Jeff Guinn is the bestselling author of numerous books, including Go Down Together, The Last GunfightMansonThe Road to JonestownWar on the Border, and Waco. He lives in Fort Worth, Texas, and is a member of the Texas Literary Hall of Fame.

About Josh Hamilton

Josh Hamilton's films include Diggers, Kicking and Screaming, The House of Yes, Alive, Online, and Outsourced. New York Stage work includes The Coast of Utopia, HurlyBurly, Proof, This is Our Youth, The Waverly Gallery, The Cider House Rules, As Bees in Honey Drown, and Suburbia.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Jeffrey on September 09, 2020

Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, John Burroughs, and Harvey Firestone. ”Beyond the pleasure it brought to the men themselves, the Edison-Ford friendship also thrilled ordinary Americans, whose lives were radically changed, to great extent blessed, by the two men’s inventions and innovations. Later in 1......more

Goodreads review by Andrew on April 08, 2019

I like Guinn. He is both a novelist of the old west and an excellent writer of social history. This book which recounts the early automobile travel of the vagabonds(Edison, Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone) is a fascinating slice of history I knew nothing about. Good portraits of thee Vagabonds in th......more

Goodreads review by Dan on June 18, 2019

Woooo, was Henry Ford anti-Semitic, or what? Great book, but Ford (and Edison, to a lesser extent) was a racist d-bag.......more

Goodreads review by Jim on May 07, 2019

I read the galley and this is an excellent book not just for students of Ford or Edison, but for anyone interested in this era. Fun, well written, highly researched and captivating. I actually picked it up just as a respite from another book and haven’t gotten back to the first book yet! Highly reco......more

Goodreads review by Melissa on July 21, 2019

"The Vagabonds” tells the story of the birth of the road trip, the American yen to load the family in the car and hit the highway. Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone and Henry Ford, a trio of inventors and industrialists spent a decade in the early 1900’s making annual road tours that popularized autom......more


Quotes

"Narrator Josh Hamilton expertly captures what two prominent Americans, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, may have sounded like. While this audiobook focuses on their friendship, it's also a history lesson and a look back at a time when automobiles were just beginning to change the country. The story of Ford and Edison's road trips together has its ups and downs. Ford was a taciturn Midwesterner who was driven to get moving and get things done; Edison, though younger, was a doddering inventor, who, in Hamilton's rendition, sounds like Hal Holbrook channeling Mark Twain."