The American Story

He was a defender of free enterprise who adored the magnificence of the American genius for progress.

He was a champion of business who believed in profiting the old-fashioned way.

He was a libertarian who deplored the rise of big government.

He was a constitutionalist who was aghast at how presidents and congresses shredded the document in times of economic crisis and war.

He was the last of the great old-time liberals who opposed FDR's welfare-warfare state.

Above all else, he was a brilliant student of the American experience who could tell a story like no one else of his generation.

Garet Garrett's last book was his own retelling of American history, with a special focus on the technologies (and people behind them) that transformed life for average people, along with a relentless and truth-telling story about the rise of the state.

These had been the themes of all of his work, from his novels of the 1920s to his case against the New Deal in the 1930s. The American Story tells the history of the American people as it has never been told, from an early experiment in freedom and the fight against the powers in Washington that sought to suppress that freedom, all the way through the beginnings of a preventable Cold War.

The Wall Street Journal called this book "probably the most brilliant long historical essay on America that has ever been written."

The images that the author presses on the mind in The American Story — a complete biography of a country — are vivid and telling, the product of a lifetime of study and the wisdom of age.