Detroit in the early 1960s was a symbol not of urban decline and Rust Belt blight, but of high hopes and youthful dreams. Coveted cars didn’t have model numbers then but names that spoke of flight and fantasy and raw animal power — the Ford Galaxie, Thunderbird and Mustang, the Plymouth Barracuda, the Chevrolet Impala — and they were rolling off the Detroit assembly lines at a record pace. The country was dancing to the beat of Motown’s irresistible pop-soul groove, and with hit after hit by Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, the Temptations and the Four Tops rolling off his assembly line, Berry Gordy would proudly proclaim Motown “the sound of young America.”

On a trip to the University of Michigan to deliver his “Great Society” speech in 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson would stop in Detroit and call the big labor city “the herald of hope in America”: “Prosperity in America must begin here in Detroit,” he intoned in his famous drawl. ”You folks in Detroit put American citizens on wheels, you have the American economy on the move. Unemployment in Detroit is down, profits are up, wages are good, and there is no problem too tough or too challenging for us to solve.”

In his elegiac and richly detailed new book, “Once in a Great City,” David Maraniss — the author of biographies of Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Roberto Clemente — conjures those boom years of his former hometown with novelistic ardor. Using overlapping portraits of Detroiters (from politicians to musicians to auto execs), he creates a mosaiclike picture of the city that has the sort of intimacy and tactile emotion that Larry McMurtry brought to his depictions of the Old West, and the gritty sweep of David Simon’s HBO series “The Wire.”

Image Credit... Patricia Wall/The New York Times

People’s experiences intersect or collide or resonate with one another, and Mr. Maraniss uses them as windows on the larger cultural and political changes convulsing the nation in the ‘60s: the struggle for civil rights; L.B.J.’s faith in the government’s ability to address the country’s biggest challenges, like poverty; and the tumult wrought by rapid social change and the rise of the boomer generation.