It seemed too good to be true—one of those oddball discoveries that make fiction writers scramble for a pencil: Calling themselves “The Vagabonds,” Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone, and Henry Ford, accompanied by naturalist John Burroughs, often “roamed the continent together on camping trips, roughing it,” often with “a gaggle of retainers,” and, as well, presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. As Nicholas Delbanco explains in this essay from The Boston Review, “no trio of entrepreneurs, I’d guess, has done more to alter the physical face of our nation than Edison and Firestone and Ford . . . It intrigued me then and intrigues me still to picture this quartet of eminences engaging in log-splitting contests and rambling over hill and dale when in a time not all that distant they would engender parking lots and interstate highways and arc-lit shopping malls.” But turning it into a novel presented some immediate problems, such as the “fear the descendants of Firestone or Ford might prove litigious.” Delbanco tells the story of how he persevered to write his newest, The Vagabonds, and includes an excerpt.