ABOUT FRED
Fred Haefele was born in Detroit, 1944. He grew up outside of Flint and the family moved to Jacksonville, Florida in 1958. His latest book, The Essential Book of Pickup Trucks (Bison Books,) will be released May 1, 2025. He is author of the award-winning motorcycle memoir, Rebuilding the Indian (Riverhead, 1998), a book acclaimed by bikers and literati alike. Haefele is author of the collection, Extremophilia (Bangtail, 2012), and his magazine work has appeared in Outside, Wired, High Country News, Salon and The NY Times. He has reviewed for The Washington Review of Books and has written for PBS’s American Experience series. He has received literary fellowships from The Fine Arts Work Center, the National Endowment for the Arts, Stanford University and the MacDowell Colony. For the past forty years, he’s made his living as an ISA certified arborist and a creative writing teacher at the University of Montana and Stanford, where he was a Jones Lecturer. He lives in Missoula with his wife, the novelist Caroline Patterson, and their two children.
BOOKS
The Essential Book of Pickup Trucks
By Fred Haefele
Of the sixty million pickups on U.S. highways today, just one in eight was bought for work purposes. The remaining fifty-four million are what truck dealers call “lifestyle purchases.” Does the pickup impulse spring from some deep, organic longing? For agrarian roots, for simpler times, for a driving experience larger than life?
The Essential Book of Pickup Trucks is a memoir about the complex role pickups have played in Fred Haefele’s life and in American culture at large. Growing up near the GM truck plant in Flint, Michigan, young Haefele was delighted by these centaur-like vehicles. In his adult life as an arborist, teacher, and father, pickups bore him through hard times and disaster, high adventure, triumph, and love. Through his tenure with twelve trucks, Haefele recounts his experiences with tree climbing and academia, masculinity and motor culture.
For Haefele, pickup trucks hold a unique place in the American psyche—equal parts fantasy steed and dray horse, they’re avatars of the American spirit. The Essential Book of Pickup Trucks is, like his trucks, uniquely free-spirited: love story, blue-collar writer’s tale, and motor-head memoir.
Rebuilding the Indian
By Fred Haefele
The building of a vintage Indian Chief motorcycle is more than the restoration of a bike—it’s the resurrection of a dream. Rebuilding the Indian chronicles one man’s journey through the fearful expanse of midlife in a quest for peace, parts, and a happy second fatherhood. Fred Haefele was a writer who couldn’t get his book published, an arborist whose precarious livelihood might just kill him, and an expectant father for the first time in over twenty years. He was in a rut, until he purchased a box of parts not so euphemistically referred to as a “basket case” and tackled the restoration of an Indian Chief motorcycle. With limited mechanical skills, one foot in the money pit, and a colorful cast of local experts, Haefele takes us down the rocky road of restoration to the headlong, heart-thrilling rush of open highway on his gleaming midnight-blue Millennium Flyer.
Extremophilia
By Fred Haefele
From working as a timber faller and a tree doctor to profiling environmental protestors and parsing through his own preoccupations with Ken Kesey, Fred Haefele has followed his curiosity into the most extraordinary corners of the place he's chosen to call home. This anthology of seventeen pieces of nonfiction gives us access not only to one of our most talented writers, it shows us the unique emotional and social topography of a region. It's an essential addition to any western bookshelf.
REVIEWS
"A great book, by a masterful practitioner. I marveled at the writing. Laughed out loud at the predicaments and antics of the dusty tree- climbing writer. Was humbled by a wise human's insights, humility, and warmth. I envied him his amazing life, wished and hope to live something similar in the American West. Now I will try to."
-Robin McLean, author of Pity the Beast and Reptile House
"What better way than a memoir about pickup trucks to forge from steel, rubber, and enamel paint a rumbling portrait of an individual American life and of a nation from the 1950s to the 2020s. Fred Haefele's The Essential Book of Pickup Trucks is a brilliant, compelling, and wryly humorous road trip through the motorized heart of the American soul."
-Peter Stark, author of Astoria and Gallop toward the Sun
"Ain't just trucks. Also chainsaws and typewriters, canoes and climbing rope, a distant dad and an undying dream, love and sex and marriage and children, failure and perseverance and mortality. Haefele delivers a three-quarter-ton load of nontoxic masculinity that smashes expec- tations to reveal something universal, let's call it the soul: soaring, striving, suffering. What a joy to ride along with a master at the height of his powers, hitting his stride after the decades of fits and starts he recounts with deadpan glee, now disarmingly humble-and humbled. A life fully lived, a tale exquisitely told."
-Mark Sundeen, author of The Man Who Quit Money and Delusions and Grandeur
"It's clear that Fred Haefele loves Montana as much as he loves old pickups. This memoir serves as a cultural history of a writer, a state, and the wheels that got him around. If you take The Essential Book of Pickup Trucks for a ride, you won't be let down."
-Steven Rinella, author, podcast host, and founder of MeatEater