Roads: Driving America's Great Highways

Roads: Driving America's Great Highways

First edition cover
Author	Larry McMurtry
Language	English
Genre	Memoir Travel literature
Publisher	Simon & Schuster
Publication date	2000
Publication place	USA
Pages	206 (first edition)
ISBN	9780684868851
OCLC	46863485
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.