Here’s what your eighty-five hundred dollars bought from the Duesenberg factory in 1930: a Model J chassis with a wheelbase of 153.3 inches—the longest production car ever made in this country—a cast-aluminum firewall, and a 420-cubic-inch engine whose 265 horsepower more than doubled what any other American automaker of the day had to offer. This machinery went to a coachbuilder (who could add as much as twenty thousand dollars to the bill), and the result was a creature of such unsurpassed power and swank that it gave a new superlative to the language. Inside, Brock Yates tells the story of the supreme American automobile.