A great mystery to me is why Garrett’s novels aren’t better known, and, indeed, seemed to have vanished as a cultural presence, even within the libertarian movement. It is something of a miracle that we were able to publish them at all, and bring them before the public anew.
I finally found a clue to a missed opportunity here in John Chamberlain’s A Life with the Printed Word (Regnery, 1982)
A high point for me was the periodic appearance in our office (The Freeman) of Garet Garrett, a holdover economist, philosopher, and novelist of the ‘20s. I had read Garrett’s amazing novel, The Driver, which was roughly based on the career of E.H. Harriman, the stockbroker who had revived the Union Pacific Railway and made it profitable. Garrett was touched that I remembered a book that had appeared in the early 20s., and he brought me his two other novels—The Cinder Buggy, a story of the erratic birth of the steel industry in a Pennsylvania that had been committed to iron, and Satan’s Bushel, a dramatic novel of the Chicago wheat pit and the Western farmers who could not avoid raising that last marginal bushel of grain that could be counted on to break the price. I promised that I would do something about his novels in the book section of The Freeman, but we were out of business before I could get to it. The novels he brought me were inscribed to his mother. “I give them to you with my heart in my mouth,” he said. My only means of repayment after Garrett’s death was to dedicate my The Roots of Capitalism to him.
