The Wild Wheel is a 1952 essay-length account by libertarian economic journalist Garet Garrett, using Ford's career to argue for laissez-faire capitalism. It is closer to a polemic about Ford's philosophy than a conventional biography — Garrett was a free-market evangelist who saw Ford as a pure example of what unregulated enterprise could achieve. The book predates the ISBN system and was published by the Foundation for Economic Education.
Garet Garrett was the leading libertarian journalist of his era, and his Ford book is useful not as a biography but as a philosophical lens. He argues that Ford succeeded precisely because he ignored the rules of established industry — the banking cartels, the supplier relationships, the labor conventions — and built from first principles. Senra draws on this framing to argue that the most disruptive founders are those who are ignorant of or indifferent to how things are 'supposed' to be done.
Garrett's Ford is a force of nature rather than a planner — someone who did not set out to revolutionize manufacturing but simply refused to accept constraints that everyone else took as given. For founders, this reframes ambition not as a goal but as a threshold: how many 'impossible' constraints are you willing to ignore?
The book is brief and passionate rather than scholarly, which limits its depth but sharpens its thesis. Senra treats it as a supplement to Nevins — the myth to Nevins's reality — and uses the contrast to show that a founder's story is always told in multiple registers: the operational truth (Nevins) and the philosophical truth (Garrett). Both are valuable; neither is complete without the other.