by RobinHemley (Author)
In 1963, when Lois Kulwicki's father loses his job at Studebaker along with hundreds of other workers, he acts as if he has just been promoted. He buys a new car (the only non-Studebaker he's ever purchased) and takes his family on vacation. On the way home, Mom dumps Dad at a Stuckey's, and that's the last they see of him.
Thirty years later, Lois has a family of her own, as fractured as her childhood family. Divorced but still living with her ex, she decides to move out with her two daughters and start over but then a stranger named Henry enters their lives. Out of this ersatz family, Lois tries to recover something of what she lost, beginning with a search for her abandoned father. The Last Studebaker is a warmly comic tale of lives changed forever, after the last Studebaker rolled off of the assembly line.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 258
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 21 Mar 2012
ISBN 10: 0253000122
ISBN 13: 9780253000125
Robin Hemley is Director of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa and author of ten books. His essays and fiction have been published in the New York Times, New York Magazine, and the Chicago Tribune.