Roads: Driving America’s Great Highways by Larry McMurtry

I thought Roads: Driving America’s Great Highways by Larry McMurtry would be full of destinations to add to my wish list. It was not. Instead, the book provided some interesting perspectives, mentioned a few places I’d like to see, and even more books to add to my To-Be-Read (TBR) list. Roads possesses more depth than breadth.

Who Was Larry McMurtry?

When I mention I’m a fan of Larry McMurtry’s books, a blank stare is the most frequent response. If people around my age or older give those blank stares, I say, Lonesome Dove or Terms of Endearment. Nods of recognition respond. The same does not work on people twenty-plus years younger than me. My manicurist said, “Sorry, I’m Gen Z. I have no idea who you’re talking about.” 

McMurtry was incredibly successful and had long been established as a significant American writer when he wrote Roads (2000). Lonesome Dove earned him the Pulitzer Prize in 1986. Several of his novels were adapted into popular films, including Horseman, Pass By, The Last Picture Show, and Terms of Endearment. 

I point this out because, in Roads, McMurtry lets readers know that he turned to the work of famous travel writers, “in the hope of seeing how travel books are made,” before attempting to write his own. “Does the route dictate the method, or vice versa? And why do the worst journeys make the best books?”

If you are looking for another travel book that also offers some travel writing advice, you might want to check out Rick Steves’ On the Hippie Trail.

What is Roads About?

Roads is about the road trips Larry McMurtry took shortly before the 20th century ended. “I wanted to drive the American roads at the century’s end, to look at the country again, from border to border and beach to beach.” 

Most of the roads McMurtry takes on his journey are interstates. He points out that their purpose is “to move you, not educate you.” Sometimes he takes them from their starting point straight through to where they terminate. Before reading Roads, I never gave much thought to roads having beginnings or ends. They do, of course, like anything else. McMurtry brought them to my attention.

“It is now possible to drive from coast to coast without speaking to a human being at all: you just slide your card, pump your gas, buy a couple of Hershey bars, perhaps heat up a burrito, and put the pedal back to the medal.” When McMurtry points out this detail, I do not sense any disdain or enthusiasm. For him, it seems to be a fact of life worth noticing but not worth getting worked up about. He tends to take a lot in stride throughout this book, like the inevitability of environmental issues, human greed, and American violence. 

He has optimistic things to say about America’s landscape and how nothing can take away its uniqueness. “In America, the light itself will always differ; the winter light on the Sault Ste. Marie, at the head of the 75, will never be like the light over the Everglades, at the bottom of that road… a thousand McDonald’s will not make Boston feel like Tucson.”

It’s a book about traveling American roads a little more than a quarter century ago. Roads is about places and home. The deep connections we can develop with the roads we most often take.

Books I’ve Added to My TBR Thanks to Roads

As I read Roads, I was both surprised and not surprised that Larry McMurtry mentioned at least as many books worth reading as places worth visiting. You can put the reader behind the wheel and send him on a road trip, but you can’t ask him not to ponder books while he does it. Thanks to McMurtry, I’ve added these to my TBR list:

Slowly Down the Ganges by Eric Newby

The Boat of Longing by O.E. Rølvaag

Interwoven: A Pioneer Chronicle by Sallie Reynolds Matthews

Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee

The Big Sky by A.B. Guthrie

We Pointed Them North by E.C. Abbott (Teddy Blue Abbott)

Red, Black, Blond, and Olive by Edmund Wilson

Susan Sontag’s essay “Fascinating Fascism”

Road Food by Jan and Michael Stern

Places I Want to Visit After Reading Roads

McMurtry isn’t insistent about the places one must see along American highways. He notices and contextualizes. Below are a few places, thanks to him, I am now curious to see: 

• The Dr. Pepper Museum in Waco, Texas. 
• Lafayette, Louisiana. McMurtry says that for many Louisianans, “Lafayette is their Paris.” 
• To cross the Mississippi River at Baton Rouge. “Crossing this river at Baton Rouge, one can see why Mark Twain loved it…”
• The Thing roadside attraction near Wilcox, Arizona. 
• Meteor Crater Natural Landmark in Winslow, Arizona. 
• Victorville, California, the “Home of the Western.” It’s where many silent era Westerns were filmed. 
• Along HWY 40 from Kingman to Albuquerque. According to McMurtry, it’s one of the most beautiful high-country drives in America.
• Rugby, North Dakota – the geographical center of North America.
• “For connoisseurs of prairie travel, U.S. 2 is the perfect road–the road into the spacious heart of the plains. It runs from Spokane, Washington, straight across Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, and Minnesota, all the way to Lake Superior.”
• Los Angeles. “Jack Kerouac said long ago that L.A. was the West Coast’s one and only golden town, and he was right.” McMurtry enjoyed its “confusion, its color, its brassiness.”

A Few More Writers and Places

McMurtry “wandered about the places where Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, Tennessee Williams, and others had lived…” When in Baltimore, he noted that, “It’s the city of Poe and Mencken and, more recently, of John Barth and Anne Tyler…” Seattle prompts him to mention Raymond Carver and Theodore Roethke. De Smet, South Dakota, makes a cameo appearance. It’s “where the author of The Little House on the Prairie settled with her family in 1879.” Northern Michigan, especially the Upper Peninsula, is on his list of places he longs to spend more time in because of writers who wrote beautifully about it: Janet Lewis and Ernest Hemingway. 

Roads gave me a lot: places to visit, books to read, and perspectives to ponder. It’s a literary tourism lover’s dream. If you’re a fan of books, writers, and places, you might want to read these posts for some travel inspiration:

Encountering Tennessee Williams in St. Louis’s Central West End

Nora Ephron Film Locations for a Romantic NYC Trip 

Our Charming Stay at Stafford’s Perry Hotel in Petoskey, MI Hemingway stayed here as a young man just starting to pursue his writing life. 

Roads: Driving America’s Great Highways
Published by Simon & Schuster
June 5, 2001 (softcover)

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