Twenty Years of Hus'ling

This is a relentlessly energetic memoir from an age when self-making was both aspiration and religion. J.P. Johnston grew up on a farm suffocating under his father's thumb, and from an early age he was possessed by one burning need: to never work for another man. What follows is two decades of spectacular, often humiliating attempts to prove himself. He tries his hand at livestock dealing, peddling, auctioneering, and God knows what else. The man gets thrown from horses, swindled by sharper operators, and humiliated in ways that would send most men scuttling back to the plow. Yet he keeps going. The humor is broad and unsentimental, Johnston can describe watching a man pitch his own wagon into a creek with the same energy another writer might bring to a Shakespearean tragedy. There's something deeply American in his relentless drive, in the way he treats every failure as tuition. He writes about himself with real wit, mocking his own vanities while demonstrating how those vanities kept him alive. By the end, he's found his calling as an auctioneer, finally commanding a room the way he'd always imagined he would. For readers who love behind-the-scenes business stories, 19th-century American character studies, or simply a good yarn about a man who refused to stay down.