Finn Murphy

Harvard Book Store welcomes long-haul trucker FINN MURPHY and The Pilgrim editor JAMES PARKER for a discussion of Murphy's memoir, The Long Haul: A Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road.

About The Long Haul

More than thirty years ago, Finn Murphy dropped out of college to become a long-haul trucker. Since then he’s covered more than a million miles packing, loading, and hauling people’s belongings all over America. Known by his trucker handle as U-Turn, he spends his days (and many of his nights) in a 53-foot eighteen-wheeler he calls Cassidy.

In The Long Haul, Murphy offers a trucker’s-eye view of America on the move. Going far beyond the myth of the American road trip, he whisks readers down the I-95 Powerlane, across the Florida Everglades, in and out of the truck stops of the Midwest, and through the steep grades of the Rocky Mountains. As he crisscrosses the country, Murphy recounts with wit, candor, and charm the America he has seen change over the decades, from the hollowing-out of small towns to changing tastes in culture and home furnishings.

Some 40 million Americans move each year, and very few have any idea what they’re getting into or the kind of person to whom they are relinquishing their worldly goods. The Long Haul is also a behind-the-scenes look at the moving industry, revealing what really happens when we call in “the movers.”

Through it all, Murphy tells poignant, funny, and often haunting stories of the people he encounters on the job: a feisty hoarder in New Hampshire; a Virginia homeowner raging when Murphy’s truck accidentally runs down a stand of trees; an ex-banker in Colorado who treats Finn and his crew with undisguised contempt; a widow who needs Murphy to bring her archeologist husband’s remains and relics to a Navajo burial ceremony in New Mexico. These experiences inspire Finn’s memorable reflections on work, class, and the bonds we form with the things we own and the places we live.

Brimming with personality and filled with great characters, The Long Haul is a resonant portrait of the enduring appeal of manual labor in the dark underbelly of the American Dream.

Praise

"America’s much-vaunted geographic mobility is built in every sense on the backs of people like Finn Murphy—yet few of us stop to consider their lives. The Long Haul is a fine remedy to that blindness, and it comes at a politically relevant moment, with a pleasing balance of humor, wisdom, and unvarnished insights into a way of life that makes the American way of life possible." —Mark Vanhoenacker, author of Skyfaring

"Like the best works of sociology, The Long Haul illuminates a ubiquitous but curiously overlooked segment of American life. But this is no mere empirical survey: Finn Murphy invites you into the air-cushioned cab of his eighteen-wheeler and along for a coast-to-coast ride that is trenchantly observed, wryly funny, and filled with human drama." —Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic