Willard Garvey: An Epic Life

Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Maura McEnaney’s fascinating and wide-ranging biography of businessman and entrepreneur Willard Garvey is, in many ways, a history of 20th-century America itself.

Born in Dust Bowl country, as a teenager he rode the rails at the height of the Great Depression to work in California’s Grapes of Wrath orchards. He sailed on the Queen Mary to the European theater of World War II, where he was one of the first three American officers into Berlin following its fal...