People · Profile No. 2

Harley Earl

There is no Corvette without Harley Earl. He built custom cars for silent-film stars before he could legally vote, invented the very idea of automotive styling as a corporate department, gave Detroit its tailfins and its dream cars — and in January 1953, put a white two-seater on a turntable at the Waldorf-Astoria because he was tired of watching servicemen come home in borrowed European roadsters. Seven chapters on the man who imagined the Corvette before anyone believed in it.

The chapters

• Prologue The Waldorf, January 1953 A white roadster on a turntable, a gamble six years in the making, and the room before Zora Arkus-Duntov ever walked into it.
• Chapter 1 The Carriage Trade A blacksmith's son builds $28,000 custom cars for silent-film royalty — and learns that automobiles could be more than machines.
• Chapter 2 Sloan's Gamble One LaSalle convinces GM's president to invent an entire industry: automotive styling, with Earl as its first director.
• Chapter 3 Dream Cars The Y-Job, the P-38 fighter plane that gave Detroit its fins, and the traveling circus called Motorama.
• Chapter 4 A Sports Car for the Rest of Us GIs are coming home in MGs and Jaguars. Earl decides America should build its own answer.
• Chapter 5 Six Months to Flint From Motorama sensation to assembly line in half a year — and the dictionary page that gave the car its name.
• Chapter 6 The Torch The Corvette nearly dies on his watch, survives, and Earl hands the studio — and the car — to his hand-picked successor.

Further reading

William Knoedelseder's Fins: Harley Earl, the Rise of General Motors, and the Glory Days of Detroit is the definitive book. Online, see the Corvette Action Center's history pages and CorvetteForum for more on the EX-122 prototype and the 1953 Motorama.

Earl's story continues in the man he chose to succeed him — read Bill Mitchell's story next — and runs alongside the engineer he hired seven months after opening night: Zora Arkus-Duntov.