An American Journey

In the spring of 1965, British novelist Ethel Mannin decided to see America "the hard way"—traveling by bus from New York to California and back. What she records in An American Journey is all too reminiscent of today's America: racial discrimination, economic inequality, environmental exploitation, and treatment of native Americans as second-class citizens. Her outsider's perspective provides an eye-opening view on both America's recent past and continuing challenges.

Starting out in New York City, Mannin crosses the U.S., noting its eyesores and disgraces along with its grandeurs and glories. Long an advocate of outsiders and the oppressed, she observes the desperate poverty on Indian reservations and the hopelessness of the young and unemployed in Watts. She sees the reluctance of America's most privileged people to open the same opportunities to its least privileged. And yet, everywhere she encounters an irrepressible sense of optimism and faith in the American dream.

As Joanna Pocock, who recounted similar journeys across America by bus in her book Greyhound, writes, Mannin records the "myriad human dramas and mundane exchanges played out and on Greyhounds across the country." At the same time, she notes, "There are two journeys at the heart of this book: an inner and an outward one," placing An American Journey among the classics of travel literature.