Who was the founder of the Ford Motor Company? Take a closer look with these 5 must-read books about Henry Ford.

1. Henry Ford: The Wayward Capitalist by Carol Gelderman

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“This engrossing book is an objective biography of Henry Ford, and it reveals the full story of the man who rarely revealed his true feelings, but who had did more than any other to change the landscape, character, and experience of twentieth-century America.”

2. The Public Image of Henry Ford: An American Folk Hero and His Company by David L. Lewis

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“Skillful journalism and meticulous scholarship are combined in the full-bodied portrait of that enigmatic folk hero, Henry Ford, and of the company he built from scratch. Writing with verve and objectivity, David Lewis focuses on the fame, popularity, and influence of America’s most unconventional businessman and traces the history of public relations and advertising within Ford Motor Company and the automobile industry.”

3. The Four Trials of Henry Ford by Gregory R. Piché

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“Henry Ford: oracular genius, people’s hero, or narcissistic, autocratic bully?

“In Gregory R. Piché’s new book, The Four Trials of Henry Ford, four landmark court cases reveal the dark side of Ford’s legal clashes and the quirks of his character and personality that ushered his image in the public’s imagination from mechanical savant and populist sage to isolated, imperious bigot.

“In recounting the Ford litigation, Piché examines Ford’s parallel manipulation of public media to advance his own political and narcissistic agenda to become a public sage and an American President. It follows the initial rise of his reputation as a progressive capitalist to its ultimate erosion as a mean-spirited bigot and contributor to the propaganda that fueled the Holocaust.”

4. I Invented the Modern Age: The Rise of Henry Ford by Richard Snow

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“A highly pleasurable read, filled with scenes and incidents from Ford’s life, particularly during the intense phase of his secretive competition with other early car manufacturers, I Invented the Modern Age shows Richard Snow at the height of his powers as a popular historian and reclaims from history Henry Ford, the remarkable man who, indeed, invented the modern world as we know it.”

5. Henry Ford’s War on Jews: and the Legal Battle Against Hate Speech by Victoria Saker Woeste

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“Henry Ford is remembered in American lore as the ultimate entrepreneur—the man who invented assembly-line manufacturing and made automobiles affordable. Largely forgotten is his side career as a publisher of antisemitic propaganda. This is the story of Ford’s ownership of the Dearborn Independent, his involvement in the defamatory articles it ran, and the two Jewish lawyers, Aaron Sapiro and Louis Marshall, who each tried to stop Ford’s war.”

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