Whether or not you’re returning to a classroom this month, September is a great time to find something new to learn. In that back-to-school spirit, here’s a list of American road novels, short stories, films, and poems designed to simulate a twelve-week course in American road culture. Each of these texts deals with some aspect of the role of the road in American literature and pop culture, from its symbolic significance to its material history.
Week 1: Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
Strange as it may seem to begin a look at the American road with a story about the American river, this novel is foundational to the distinction between Home and Away that the American road myth relies on.
Week 2: Sterling A. Brown, Southern Road (1932)
Using the jazz style that’s so important to the Harlem Renaissance, this poetry collection explores the modernist anxiety about the effects of urbanization. Specifically, Brown highlights the role of incarcerated Black men in building America’s infrastructure.
Week 3: John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
Steinbeck’s novel of migration and disillusion has had a profound impact on the cultural imagination of the Great Depression. Its depiction of the Route 66 highway is central to the novel’s artistry.
Week 4: Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)
Widely considered the most influential American road novel, On the Road recounts a series of road trips across the US. Largely autobiographical, the novel popularized the Beat cultural movement and helped spark a broader counterculture that lasted into the 1970s.
Week 5: Richard Matheson, “Duel” (1971); Steven Spielberg, Duel (1971)
This short story and its screen adaptation pair well as an examination of the isolation, dehumanization, and precarity of late capitalism. The barren highway setting becomes the site of the protagonist’s transformation from placid everyman to crazed animal.
Week 6: Robert Harmon, The Hitcher (1986); John Hughes, Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987)
Two very different takes on the nostalgia for the spirit of the road that permeates ‘80s road films in response to the oil crises of the 1970s.
Week 7: Ridley Scott, Thelma & Louise (1991); Beeban Kidron, To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995)
Who is entitled to the promised freedoms of the open road? Both these films offer perspectives on road culture not centred on heterosexual, white men.
Week 8: Rob Cohen, The Fast and the Furious (2001)
The first installment in the immensely popular Fast and Furious franchise, this film is a high-energy exploration of the relationship between the road, the law, and a certain type of American masculinity.
Week 9: Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006)
This post-apocalyptic road novel mixes adventure, drama, and horror to explore the fate of the family when the home is taken away. A father and son’s journey westward becomes part exodus and part pilgrimage as the characters are transformed by the horrors and hopes of their experience.
Week 10: Helena María Viramontes, Their Dogs Came with Them (2007)
Set during the 1960s, as California displaces the residents of the East Los Angeles barrio to make way for a freeway, this multi-perspective novel explores the inequities embedded in the American commitment to automobility and reveals the ways free movement is about not only the right to leave, but the right to stay.
Week 11: Stephen Graham Jones, Mongrels (2016)
Using werewolves as a metaphor for the marginalized experience of Indigenous people in the United States, Jones’s novel portrays a family forced to live on the run in a world designed according to the conviction that they don’t exist. The protagonist, a young boy, must understand his past and shape his future without the help of a permanent home.
Week 12: Jessmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017)
This African American gothic novel confines its road trip to a short journey from rural Mississippi to the state penitentiary and back again. Rather than an instrument of freedom, the car becomes a space of confinement and crisis that reflects the role of the state in limiting the free movement of Black Americans.
Combined, these texts present the many views of the road in American culture, from a symbol of escape from the confines of civilization to an agent in the mundanities of modern life. Be sure to pay careful attention; there may be a test later.
Photo by JC Dela Cuesta on Unsplash
