Road trips define the American experience and character. Be it from the immigrants who travel to this country, Parkman’s Oregon Trail, Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, or movies such as Thelma & Louise and Easy Rider, the road conveys powerful and often contradictory lessons for those who seek to learn from their experiences. Barndt’s brief book captures the American experience of the road, describing five different genres: seekers, walkers, laborers, bikers, and pretenders. For each type, Barndt (Pomona College) juxtaposes traveler stories, Whitman and Kerouac as seekers, Thoreau and Cheryl Strayed as walkers, the characters in Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave and Grapes of Wrath as laborers, Hunter Thompson and Erika Lopez as bikers, and Griffin’s Black Like Me to Twain’ Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as portrayals of pretenders. The goal is to capture the contradictory experiences of the road, depending on race, class, gender, or sexual orientation, and locate the traveler’s experiences within a broader definition of American character. Travel stories are not simply autobiographical, they are statements about and of American political thought. Excellent for collections on American political thought, history, and literature.



Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Choice Reviews

Susan McWilliams Barndt’s new book is motivated by a provocative premise: “That stories of American road trips are an important form of American political thought, and certainly more central to American political thought than almost anyone has recognized before” (xv). But if Barndt is a provocateur, she is also a powerful persuader. After reading The American Road Trip and American Political Thought, it is hard to deny that she is on to something: Barndt succeeds, by and large, in unearthing a previously unrecognized dimension of American political thought and in showing the analytical importance of that finding.

VoegelinView

Susan McWilliams Barndt has become my favorite traveling companion. After reading Traveling Back: Toward a Global Political Theory, I was eager to hit the open road with her in The American Road Trip and American Political Thought. Barndt takes the authors of travel stories as her guides to navigating the American political tradition. Susan McWilliams Barndt smartly and elegantly explores the paradoxes of freedom and belonging in a vast, diverse republic.

Natalie Taylor, Skidmore College

Fasten your seatbelts for a magical tour. Susan McWilliams has written a truly delightful analysis about the literature of travel through American time and space.

Along the way, Road Trip offers formidable insights into American thought and culture. Suave, subtle, richly imagined, masterfully analyzed, beautifully written and altogether brilliant.

James Morone, author of Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History and professor of political science, Brown University, author of Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History and professor of political science, Brown University

McWilliams Barndt’s fine study of our shared highway proves a keen aid for gaining some orientation on this quintessentially American myth and matter-of-fact reality.

The Review of Politics