The Ultimate U.S. Road Trip Reading List

Books to put you in that cross country state of mind.

Chris Ritter

Jack Kerouac, On the Road

indianapublicmedia.org

Let's get this one out of the way.

John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

forestglenroad.org

An American Institution travels the country in his later years, with poodle in tow? Hell yeah.

Denis Johnson, Train Dreams

gregwalklin.com

A short, kinda lonesome book about a drifter-type character in the American West during the late 19th century. The prose is sparse, but it's surprisingly emotional and poignant.

Joan Didion, The White Album

ihavegoodbooks.blogspot.com

Wonderfully captures the creeping anxieties of life in California as the utopian dream of the '60s flickered out.

Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

amazon.com

Who wouldn't want to read Mark Twain write about his experience as a steamboat captain on the Mississippi river?

Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

chaboneobaiarroyoallende.tumblr.com

A seminal bit of New Journalism. Wolfe follows Ken Kesey and his LSD'd-out Merry Pranksters around the country.

William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways: A Journey Into America

hachettebookgroup.com

"Blue highways" are non-interstate roads on older U.S. maps. Heat-Moon traveled these backroads to write about places like "Remote, Oregon; Simplicity, Virginia; New Freedom, Pennsylvania; New Hope, Tennessee; Why, Arizona; Whynot, Mississippi."

Richard Brautigan, A Confederate General from Big Sur

amazon.com

Time this one with your drive up the California coast. A slightly meandering, almost absurdist tale with incredible imagery.

John McPhee, Coming into the Country

booksbenread.tumblr.com

Okay, so not every U.S. road trip includes a drive through Alaska, but McPhee (a long revered New Yorker staff writer) has a meticulous and deeply engaging prose style.

Cheryl Strayed, Wild

pankmagazine.com

A reflective and ultimately triumphant memoir about overcoming grief and "figuring it all out" that manages to avoid seeming self-indulgent or precious. The reviewer for the New York Times says it "pretty much obliterated [him]."

Larry Brown, Big Bad Love

billleonebookseller.com

Subtle, powerful, big-hearted short stories about Southern life with consistently magnetic characters.

Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

thebookbourgeois.blogspot.com

Drugs and visions and the desert and American mania and — most importantly — Thompson's legendarily batshit prose-poetry.

Bonnie Jo Campbell, Once Upon a River

bullmensfiction.com

A sixteen year-old heroine sets out on a rural Michigan river. Harrowing and a full of wonderful details.

Richard Wright, Black Boy

ferrispark.com

Wright's autobiography, with powerful portraits of both his childhood struggles in the racist south of the '20s and his fitful political and intellectual awakenings after a move to Chicago.

Carl Sandburg, Harvest Poems: 1910-1960

etsy.com

Legendary critic H.L. Mencken called Sandburg "indubitably an American in every pulse-beat."

Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find

e-reading.mobi

A stone-cold classic set of short stories that are dark and feverish and redemptive. Wrestles with that conflicted, twisted American moral compass.

Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

robert-eaton.com

An impassioned paean to nature, framed around Abbey's time as a park ranger in the Southwest.

Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

amazon.com

A turn of the century tale of Swedish immigrants in the American heartland. Manages to capture the epic sweep of America's changing new frontier.

Sherman Alexie, Reservation Blues

en.wikipedia.org

Alexie's writing is steeped in a very American brand of magical realism. Reservation Blues orbits around the legend of delta blues legend Robert Johnson and life on a Spokane Indian reservation.

Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

yackman.com

A true tale of the "back to the land" dream gone terribly wrong. Fascinating reportage.

Chuck Klosterman, Killing Yourself to Live

books.simonandschuster.net

The account of a road trip across America loosely organized around investigating the deaths of rock stars. Not everyone loves Klosterman's goofily irreverent style, but Killing Yourself is an undeniably inventive modern American travelogue.

Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail

npr.org

A love letter to some of America's awe-inspiring natural beauty.

BONUS: Dashboard Books

Going cross country, the car is your home and the dashboard is your coffee table.

Robert Frank, The Americans

jpgmag.com

Frank traveled around America for two straight years (1955-57), taking nearly 28,000 photos in the process. The result is maybe the most definitive snapshot of the country and its citizens in their own time.

See some of the photos here.

Paul Fusco, RFK

behance.net

Fusco traveled on the train carrying Robert F. Kennedy's casket from New York City to Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, taking photos of the onlookers crowding the tracks. Elegiac and moving.

See some of the photos here.