Behind us lay the whole of America and everything Dean and I had previously known about life, and life on the road. We had finally found the magic land at the end of the road and we never dreamed the extent of the magic. Sal Paradise, a young innocent, joins the slightly crazed Dean Moriarty on a breathless, exuberant ride back and forth across the United States. Their hedonistic search for release or fulfilment through drink, sex, drugs and jazz...

A memoir of the steamboat era on the Mississippi River before the American Civil War. The first half details a brief history of the river from its discovery by Hernando de Soto in 1541 and describes Twain's career as a Mississippi steamboat pilot, the fulfillment of a childhood dream. The second half of Life on the Mississippi tells of Twain's return, many years after, to travel the river from St. Louis to New Orleans. By then the competition from...

Originally published over one hundred years ago, "Roughing It" tells the (almost) true story of Mark Twain's rollicking adventures across the United States. A hilarious account of how the author tried finding wealth in the rocks of Nevada, it was published before his most famous works and shows why he would grow to become one of the most beloved American writers of all time. The story follows many of Twain's early adventures, including a visit to...

A rabbit named Jack travels across the United States in a story based on the life of author Jack Kerouac.

"How do we become who we are in the world? We ask the world to teach us. On her 120-acre homestead high in the Colorado Rockies, beloved writer Pam Houston learns what it means to care for a piece of land and the creatures on it. Elk calves and bluebirds mark the changing seasons, winter temperatures drop to 35 below, and lightning sparks a 110,000 acre wildfire, threatening her century old barn and all its inhabitants. Through her travels from the...

"George Gibson is determined to check off the last item on his bucket list: a trip across America. He hops in his RV to visit--and sketch--the buildings and places across America that he and his wife never got to see. When his daughter learns of a young boy forced to give up a beloved Saint Bernard named Lewis, she suggests George adopt the animal as a traveling companion ... As George warms to his travel mate, he begins talking to Lewis, sharing...

A young man and his dog drive west from Ohio and marvel at the farms of Iowa, the skies of Nebraska, the wind in Wyoming, the mountains of Colorado, the desert in Nevada, and the ocean in Oregon.

"From July 4, 1845 to September 6, 1847 Henry David Thoreau lived alone in the cabin he built on the shores of Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts. Walden is the classic account of his stay--his experiment in essential living. This book is framed as a narrative of the cycle of one year, beginning with summer. Thoreau uses the changes of the day, the seasons, and the year to symbolize the quiet revolution that is going on inside him. His specific...

Describes the difficulties faced by the first woman to make a cross-country journey from New York to San Francisco in an automobile in 1909.

For the first time in paperback, an acclaimed look at the American South through the lenses of its most acclaimed storytellers and their tales.Rarely does a nonfiction work come along that is as original and refreshing as Sitting Up with the Dead. Here, take a ride with Pamela Petro as she embarks on a series of road trips through the states of the Old South to collect its stories and meet its tellers of traditional tales. Some of them are local celebrities,...