The American Open Road

The phrase “open road” has long captivated the American popular imagination. Americans have long believed in the open road with such fervent passion that it has served as a secular faith built around aspiration and optimism. Though the longing for the open road has animated the United States from its beginnings, the boom following World War II centralized the automotive road narrative in popular culture. In The American Open Road, Jeffrey Melton taps into that restless energy with engaging prose, an impressive display of creative scholarship, and a wide array of compelling illustrations.

In Part One, he delves into the cultural context of the post-World War II boom that catapulted car culture to the forefront of American society and consciousness. In Part Two, he defines major patterns and conventions of the road narrative as revealed in a wide range of seminal literary works that earned popular and critical attention in the key decades from the 1950s to the 1980s. In Part Three, he focuses on persistent challenges to the open road experience arising from the cultural tensions of race, gender, and ethnicity.

Although Melton draws upon a variety of sources—from automobile advertisements, magazine covers, and public-service documents to song lyrics and poems—his discussion focuses on well-known literary and cinematic narratives that have engendered the greatest impact upon American culture. Those prose narratives (both fiction and nonfiction) and films (including television) are the most illustrative expressions of the open road, as Americans tell their road stories forever with an eye upon the horizon. The open road cuts a broad swath through American culture like the roadways that form an ever-changing matrix on the landscape itself. Every mile holds a narrative of some sort, and every car is tied to ever-evolving American dreams.