The Flivver King: A Story of Ford-America

Compare and contrast the three women who marry into the Shutt family: Milly, Annabelle, and Dell. What are their lives like? What does each woman value? What views, if any, do they have about the labor struggle and how did they come to hold those views? With whom do you think Sinclair sympathizes most?

Why do you think Sinclair chose to use third-person omniscient narration for this story? What would have been different, had he chosen to use a first-person narrator? If you had to rewrite the novel, using one of its characters as a first-person limited narrator, whom would you choose and why? What would be gained or lost by changing the novel’s narrative strategy in this way?

At what point in the story do you think Ford ceases to be the author of his own actions, and surrenders his agency to money and profit, instead?

If you did not know about Ford’s anti-Semitism and Nazi sympathies before reading this novel: What did you know about the Ford Company and Henry Ford before reading The Flivver King? Where did you learn it? What attitudes did you have toward Ford before reading this novel? How did you feel when you read the parts of the novel that dealt with anti-Semitism and the Nazis? How do you think Sinclair’s intended audience would have reacted?

Which of the characters in The Flivver King do you think is most believable as an individual (hint: look for things like dynamism and roundness)? Which do you find least believable? Why? (Provide and analyze several passages from the novel in order to support your claims.)

The final chapters of The Flivver King jump back and forth between the dinner party where Ford is a guest and the tense car chase that culminates in Tom Shutt being severely beaten. What is the function of the extended dinner-party scenes? Why did Sinclair provide so many details about the party, the house where it is held, the guests, and their activities? Is there any symbolic value to these passages?

If you have read Ford’s own autobiography, compare and contrast his presentation of himself in that book with Sinclair’s representation of him in The Flivver King. Which book did you find a more compelling read, and why? Which did you find more believable, and why? (And if you chose two different titles in response to those two questions, what do you make of this discrepancy?)

Sinclair initially presents Ford as a likeable and quintessentially American character, though he later depicts Ford as morally callous and a Nazi sympathizer. He also presents Abner as a sympathetic figure, though Abner joins the Ku Klux Klan, a violent racist organization. What do you make of Sinclair’s representation of these two men? What artistic or rhetorical motivation might Sinclair have for presenting both (at least initially) as likeable, sympathetic, and as embodying a variety of “typically American” virtues?