Driving America

The end of the road trip. America. The open road. It’s the setting for many of the 20th century’s great stories. Jacob Hoerger explores the limits of the road trip as a source of inspiration. "The failure of life to live up to literature is of course nothing new, although the road-trip myth is both particularly seductive and particularly misleading. On the first count, because all you need to imagine yourself as the hero is a car and some gas money, and on the second because most road-trip lit tends to elide the fact that for the vast majority of the time on the road nothing interesting is happening. Meanwhile, technological and cultural developments have removed many of the challenges that generated the drama for the canonical road trip narratives. As Ari Schulman details in his 2011 essay 'GPS and the End of the Road,' better cars, roads and navigation equipment all mean there will is less chance for something to go wrong, which means less material for a good story."