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seat promised to bemuch more fun than sitting on the front porch under the watchful eye of parents. For people past that stage in their relationship, meeting for trysts became much easier, which led to an increase in adultery and divorce. In the 1950s, drive-in movie theatres were known as passion pits—for self-evident reasons. And just about everyone has a sex-in-a-car story. (Even as a non-driving teenager, I always made sure I invited a girl with a car to the high-school dance.) As MacDonald put it, “Cars shape our lives from conception in the back seat to being hauled out in the hearse.”
    THE AMERICAN LOVE AFFAIR with the automobile really became serious in the 1920s. Early cars were expensive and, like bug-plagued early personal computers, not that user-friendly. Before Charles Kettering invented the electric self-starter that first appeared on the 1912 Cadillac, the only way to get a car going was with a hand crank, which was not just hard work but also dangerous as more than a few drivers broke thumbs, wrists and even arms trying to start their automobiles. The new starters were great for Caddy owners, but it took at least a decade before the technology trickled down to lowlier models. And for all its popularity, Henry Ford’s Model T was open to the elements, and that meant it wasn’t practical except in temperate weather. In 1920, about 90 percent of cars were open, but several manufacturers began producing affordable alternatives, and by 1930, about 90 percent of cars were closed. The growth in auto sales was striking: the United States had 8.1 million registered cars in 1920 and 24 million by October 1929, when the stock market crashed.
    As usual, American literature reflected the social change that followed this boom. In Babbit , Sinclair Lewis’s classic 1922 satire of conformity and social climbing, the striving protagonist buys an automobile: “To George F. Babbitt, as to most prosperous citizens of Zenith, his motor car was poetry and tragedy, love and heroism. The office was his pirate ship but the car his perilous excursion ashore.” Lewis goes on to describe the daily challenge ofstarting the thing and later writes: “It took but little more time to start his car and edge it into traffic than it would have taken to walk the three and a half blocks to the club.” But of course, Babbitt—who desires all the latest technology—feels powerful and important in his shiny ride.
    Cars play a central role in what is arguably the greatest American novel ever written, The Great Gatsby . The setting of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 masterpiece is the Long Island suburbs of West Egg and East Egg, and Jay Gatsby’s Rolls-Royce is a symbol of his nouveau riche wealth. “At nine o’clock, one morning in July, Gatsby’s gorgeous car lurched up the rocky drive to my door and gave out a burst of melody from its three-noted horn,” recounts narrator Nick Carraway. At a time when most cars were black, Gatsby drove one that was “a rich cream color, bright with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant hat-boxes and supper-boxes and tool-boxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of wind-shields that mirrored a dozen suns. Sitting down behind many layers of glass in a sort of green leather conservatory, we started to town.” Bad driving is rampant in the book. After Carraway tells Jordan Baker, the dishonest golfer, “You’re a rotten driver,” she claims it doesn’t matter because other people are careful. “‘They’ll keep out of my way,’ she insisted. ‘It takes two to make an accident.’” (Both Jordan and Baker Electric were early automakers, and in 1923 the Jordan Motor Car Company ran ads that featured an independent, convention-breaking woman.)
    The roadside billboard for oculist Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, complete with giant blue eyes behind massive yellow glasses, watches over