The Chevrolet Corvette was the first all-American sports car that was built on American soil, so it really is no surprise that it has become iconic, and as representative of American culture as the proverbial baseball, Mom and apple pie.

The Corvette was inspired by GIs returning home after World War II, bringing with them MGs, Jaguars, and Alfa Romeos. In 1951, after Nash Motors began selling their two-seat Nash-Healey, which was co-developed by British engineer Donald Healey and Italian designer Pinin Farina, that Harley Earl, who had been hired by GM in 1927 because he had a flair for automotive styling, convinced the company they also needed to build a two-seater.

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CORVETTE BROCHURES, CATALOGS, FOLDERS
1954	1954	1956
1956	1957	1962
1963	1964	1965
1968	1969	1970
1972	1972	1973
1973	1974	1975
1975	1976	1977
1978	1978	1979
1980	1981	1982
1982	1982	1984
1985	1987	1987
1990	1991	1992
1994	1995	1995
1997	1998	1998
1998	2000	2005
2005	2006	2006

Code named "Opel," the secret project that Earl began that year would eventually result in the 1953 Corvette, which debuted at the Motorama car show. Its original concept design included the integration of the American flag, but that was changed before the car ever saw production, because it was felt that associating the flag with a product was disrespectful.

The Corvette's name came from Myron Scott, who borrowed the word from a kind of small fighting frigate, and the first models were built by hand at Chevrolet's customer delivery center in Flint, MI. (The center has since become an academic building on the Kettering University campus.) The outer body was build from the then-revolutionary fiberglass, a material chosen because steel was still in short supply owing to the recent war.

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CORVETTE BOOKS

Underneath the new fiberglass body, the components were pretty standard Chevy offerings: the "blue flame" six-cylinder truck engine, two speed "Powerglide" automatic transmission, and drum brakes from the regular car line. Engine output was increased a bit by using a triple-carburetor intake exclusive to the mode, but performance was lacking, especially when compared to British and Italian sports cars of the same era. Compared to them, the Corvette seemed underpowered, had a difficult time stopping, and was considered wanting because it didn't have a manual transmission. While the marque had previously been known for high-quality, un-fussy cars, the spiffy Corvette's sales went from bad to worse.

Corvette was saved from a well-considered extinction two years later, when Chevy's first V8 engine since 1919 was developed. Soviet-born engineer Zora Arkus-Duntov married the V8 to a three-speed manual transmission, and in the process turned the Corvette into the performance car it was always meant to be.

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CORVETTE MEMORABILIA

It is the third generation Stingray, patterned after Chevy's "Mako Shark II" that debuted in 1968 and remained in production until 1982 that most of us think of when we hear the name "Corvette," and it was introduced to the public in a rather interesting fashion. 1968 was also the debut of Mattel's Hot Wheels line of 1/64-scale toy cars. General Motors tired to keep the look of the Stingray under tight wraps, but when Hot Wheels unveiled their own line several weeks before the actual car was introduced, it included a model of the "custom Corvette" — and authorized model of the 1968 Corvette Stingray.

Inspired by returning soldiers, pioneering the use of fiberglass forms, and ending up not just in the garage, but on the racetrack, the Corvette is quite possibly the ultimate American car.