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The Manuscripts series contain longer pieces, both fiction and nonfiction, that reflect Schoening's interest in automobiles, travel, and socio-economic perspectives on the United States and Michigan. Both "The Automobile" and "The Story of Our 'Billy' Buick" provide accounts (with slight variations) of Schoening's experiences as a travelling salesman in the western United States from 1919 to 1921 and the cross-country journeys he took with his wife as he set forth and returned from this endeavor. These pieces include firsthand accounts of life on the road and the often harrowing conditions of highways in the early twentieth century, with narrations of stops in Flint, Chicago, Portland, Salt Lake City, Yellowstone, and other locales. The manuscript Red Biz is also significant for its depiction of conditions in a factory and the relations between the titular floor manager and his employees immediately after the first World War, with additional domestic scenes and back story set in late nineteenth-century Ann Arbor and Saginaw.