Before Kentucky Fried Chicken, Harland Sanders drifted between jobs for decades: farmhand, mule-tender, railroad man, insurance salesman, ferry operator, gas station owner. At 65, a new interstate diverted traffic away from his roadside restaurant, leaving him with little more than a Social Security check and his fried chicken recipe.
In this 1974 autobiography, Sanders looks back on a hardscrabble Kentucky upbringing and a working life full of false starts, told in his own plainspoken, often funny voice. It reads less like a business memoir than a portrait of persistence, the story of a man who kept starting over until, in his sixties, one idea finally stuck.
Published 1974
144 pages