There’s nothing more American than packing up your shit and getting out of town; hitting the road is a tentpole our literature. Before the car, you’d hop on the water like Ishmael in Moby Dick or Huck Finn; then in the 20th century, you can pile in the car like the Joads of Grapes of Wrath or Sal Paradise in On the Road. Alongside E Pluribus Unum we might as well add Go West Young Man and Goodbye to All That to our coins: at some point in America you gotta hit the bricks. And while the quest narrative (leave home, change, return home, changed) is as old as books themselves, there’s something about those long cross-country highways that makes Americans particularly suited to the road novel; you’re just a cheap set of wheels away from learning something about yourself and/or the country if you simply hit the gas and point the car away from home.
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