Roads: Driving America's Great Highways

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Roads: Driving America's Great Highways
Roads McMurtry 2000.jpg
Author Larry McMurtry
LanguageEnglish
GenreMemoir
Travel literature
Publication date
2000
Publication placeUSA
Preceded by Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections on Sixty and Beyond  
Followed by Paradise  

Roads: Driving America's Great Highways is a 2000 non-fiction book by Larry McMurtry about driving around the USA. The book not only catalogues his observations along the journey but also includes a discussion of travel writing, with McMurtry taking an interest in the work of previous authors in the genre. He also intersperses the work with introspections about the routes his life has taken. [1]

Reception

The book was a part memoir. According to The New York Times "the book is not an aid to travel but an occasion for fleeting, from-the-hip commentary on anything along the way that comes to his eye or mind." [2] Michiko Kakutani positively reviewed the book, enjoying McMurtry's observations on the road and his reminisces about his childhood. [3]

The Austin Chronicle wrote "this is not really a book about taking trips along specific roads but another Proustian journey along the trails in Texas' most famous novelist's varied past as he traces the places that have been central to his life and work" and it "should be read as a companion piece to McMurtry's last memoir, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen ." [4]

References

  1. De Barros, DP (January 29, 2009). Bendixen, Alfred; Hamera, Judith (eds.). The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing. Cambridge University Press. p. 238. ISBN   9781139827843.
  2. "Life in the Fast Lane". New York Times. 16 July 2000. Retrieved 3 August 2024.
  3. Kakutani, Michiko (2000-07-06). "Books of The Times: As a Ribbon Unfurls Into Infinity". archive.nytimes.com. Retrieved 2025-03-06.
  4. "Two for the Road". Austin Chronicle. 4 August 2000. Retrieved 3 August 2024.