Fuel Road Trip Dreams with AMERICAN ROAD

This issue of American Road celebrates literature and the way it moves us. It begins with “Lit Wagons”—a feature that examines five real-life vehicles that found immortality in books. Who could forget Neal Cassady’s trusty Hudson from On the Road? Or Ken Kesey’s psychedelic bus from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test? Robert Pirsig once showed us how to find enlightenment by riding a Honda Super Hawk. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he proved that even buddhas need to vacation.

Our features continue with “American Road’s Overlooked Road Fiction” and “Novel Postcards”—the latter of which takes its own turn with those pretty images that sail through the mail. We putter along California’s coast to Point Lobos State Reserve and surmise how Robert Lewis Stevenson came to write Treasure Island. We roll through Red Cloud, Nebraska, to see the sights that defined Willa Cather’s My Ántonia. Then we have a martini with The Maltese Falcon in a San Francisco classic and take a spin on the carousel from The Catcher in the Rye in New York’s Central Park. For our final chapter, we drop into Oxford, Mississippi, to visit the former residence of novelist William Faulkner. There we discover that he mapped out plot points for his 1954 novel, A Fable, in short sentences on his office wall.