18 Great Road Trip Books That Aren't ‘On the Road'

New York Times

a day ago

'A fast car and an open road can give you a sensation that's hard to duplicate elsewhere or otherwise,' Cormac McCarthy wrote in his powerful late-career novel 'The Passenger.' The car doesn't even have to be all that fast for you to want to stick your head out of the window and whoop.
Summer is the season for road trips, for tapping into that broad and baked-in American narrative of adventure and individualism, for pushing past the constraints of home and career, for fleeing responsibility and learning to love fuzzy dice, low riders, monster trucks, loud stereos, vanity plates, muscle cars and non-factory shades of cherry red all over again.
'Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me,' Jack Kerouac wrote in 'On the Road,' a novel that is revered for a reason; the spontaneity of Kerouac's prose was a perfect fit for intensity of the free-flowing visions of America that came flooding to him.
Cars are confessionals. They're often where we tell our best stories. What follows is a list of road trip stories, fiction and nonfiction, that have moved and inspired us in the years since 'On the Road' appeared in 1957. All were written in a spirit of enlightened inquiry. Some are introspective; others have the pedal pushed fully to the floor. Some are primarily about running away; others are about rushing toward. When needed, they've braced our lapsing morale.
In an era of cellphones and GPS, it's harder than it used to be to go get lost — but it remains worth the effort, especially in an era when the notion of what America is, and who we are, is so fundamentally up for grabs. Road trips are, oddly, grounding and often humbling; they can help the wanderer stay sane in a demented world. We've picked these 18 sensitive and intelligent books because they are like motorcycles that start on the first kick. Pick one and hold on.
SEEKING: HEAD SPACE
America the Beautiful? by Blythe Roberson (2023)
'Women have written fewer books about being free on the road or in nature for the obvious reason that women are less free than men are,' writes Roberson in her breezy, antsy, archetypically millennial account of touring national parks as a single white female in a borrowed Prius. A comedian and former researcher for 'The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,' she encounters kids peeing, mighty bison and triple-digit temperatures while confronting the myths behind the monuments. Her many jokes about being murdered aside, the reality of 21st-century road trips is that they are almost too safe, what with geolocation and packs of Instagram influencers. Roberson considers how much of travel is actually trespass. ALEXANDRA JACOBS
READ IF YOU LIKE: 'Wild,' by Cheryl Strayed; 'The Last American Road Trip,' by Sarah Kendzior; 'National Lampoon's Vacation.'
SEEKING: NIRVANA
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, by Tom Wolfe (1968)
Nearly 60 years after its publication, Tom Wolfe's classic of New Journalism is still worth a look. Wolfe rode along with the novelist Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters on a cross-country tour in a bus named Furthur. ('Caution: Weird Load' read a sign on the back.) Acid is consumed; Feds are dodged; jam sessions ensue; mayhem is constant. The cameos by Allen Ginsberg, the Grateful Dead, the Hells Angels and Larry McMurtry are worth the journey. This is off-kilter, star-spangled Americana. DWIGHT GARNER
READ IF YOU LIKE: 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,' by Hunter S. Thompson; 'The Moronic Inferno,' by Martin Amis; 'Easy Rider.'
These days I prefer Joyce Johnson's memoir, 'Minor Characters,' about her time with Kerouac. But I did read 'On the Road' again a few years ago and it got to me all over again. Kerouac's exuberance is what sucks you in, but his powers of description are what hold you in your seat. — DG
I can't get out of my head Truman Capote's insult that Kerouac merely typed rather than writing. But I love comparing his twentysomethings — the slang, the ragged maturity, the internetlessness — to today's Gen Z #vanlifers. — AJ
I'll confess that even though it's a pretty short book I've never finished it. I can't get into the voice, which seems intoxicated by itself. The magic has always eluded me. — JS
SEEKING: A FRESH START
The Lincoln Highway, by Amor Towles (2021)
Nebraska in midcentury, summer: In this sturdy novel of male bonding, Emmett Watson is an orphaned 18-year-old just released from a work farm. His only possession of worth is a 1948 blue Studebaker, in which he plans (meticulously) to take his brainy, much younger brother Billy west. But a couple of stowaways — one conniving, the other blue-blooded and clueless — will throw up serious road blocks. Moral ambiguity rolls in faster than a San Francisco fog. — AJ
READ IF YOU LIKE: 'East of Eden,' by John Steinbeck; 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,' by Mark Twain; 'Manhattan Beach,' by Jennifer Egan.
SEEKING: A SENSE OF DIRECTION
Driving Mr. Albert, by Michael Paterniti (2000)
Marriage, mortality and the theory of relativity undergird this account of a cross-country trip with an octogenarian pathologist. But Paterniti, a veteran magazine writer, makes his weighty themes go down easy. In addition to the typical road-trip cargo — clothes, snacks and, because it was the 1990s, a box of audiocassettes — this journey also includes a priceless item filled with metaphor (and formaldehyde): plastic Tupperware containing chunks of Albert Einstein's brain. JENNIFER SZALAI
READ IF YOU LIKE: 'Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers,' by Mary Roach; 'Einstein's Dreams,' by Alan Lightman.
South — always south. My wife and I got engaged on a road trip through Mississippi, Tennessee and Alabama, where I proposed in a restaurant known for its fried chicken. — DG
A couple of years ago, my family drove from Las Vegas up to Death Valley and then down along the edge of the Mojave. Death Valley was sublime, in the truest sense of the word: beautiful and a bit terrifying. — JS
The one that takes me back to New York City. But the Niagara Falls, with their tremendous rushing sound, rainbows and tantalizing peek at Canada, never disappoint. — AJ
SEEKING: RELIEF FROM GRIEF
I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home, by Lorrie Moore (2023)
Here is one of the most unusual road trips in the canon: Riding shotgun is a talking dead (undead?) woman — the driver's ex-girlfriend, a suicide — on her way to a body farm in the south. The result is a humane, folk-horror adjacent comedy of manners as only Lorrie Moore could have told it. The car sex is … well, find out for yourself. This pair travels under a 'wheeling ceiling of the stars' and 'the ambiguous emoji of the moon.' — DG
READ IF YOU LIKE: 'Her Body and Other Parties,' by Carmen Maria Machado; 'An American Werewolf in London.'
SEEKING: LOST LOVE
The Road to Tender Hearts, by Annie Hartnett (2025)
Ollie and Luna are Irish twins, fourth graders whose parents have just died in a murder-suicide involving Visine-laced coffee. They have fallen to the care of their great-uncle PJ, a divorced, unemployed drunk lottery winner and survivor of multiple heart attacks, whose older daughter also perished as a teen. What is this bereaved crew to do but hop in a red Volvo (safety first!) with PJ's depressed other daughter, Sophie, and a possibly prescient cat named Pancakes? 'The Road to Tender Hearts' is absurdly over-the-top in plot, yet warms like a heated seat. — AJ
READ IF YOU LIKE: 'Little Miss Sunshine'; 'The Wangs vs. the World,' by Jade Chang; 'The Boxcar Children,' by Gertrude Chandler Warner.
I didn't grow up with a car, and so my road-tripping has mostly been as a grown-up, trying to keep my own kid entertained. A reliable standby was Ghost — each person names a letter that's supposed to add up to a word, but the loser is the one who is forced to finish a word. A game easier to play than explain! — JS
My husband likes a variant called Superghost, for which you add letters on both sides. He is humiliatingly superior at puzzles as well as driving. — AJ
We'd play a game in which everyone must tell a brief story, funny or tragic, about each part of their body, working from the toes up to the hair. (No, not the naughty bits.) — DG
SEEKING: SEXUAL ADVENTURE
Tramps Like Us, by Joe Westmoreland (2001)
This openhearted and winningly casual novel tracks one young gay man's coming of age while crisscrossing a wilder and more benevolent America in the 1970s and '80s. He hitches, drives and rides buses from Kansas City to San Francisco to New Orleans and almost every place in between, in search of love, adventure and high times. Originally published by a small press, this reissue is a lost, heat-seeking road classic. — DG
READ IF YOU LIKE: 'City Boy,' by Edmund White; 'The Basketball Diaries,' by Jim Carroll; 'My Own Private Idaho.'
SEEKING: ACCEPTANCE (NOT ACCOMMODATION)
Nevada, by Imogen Binnie (2013)
This fresh, funny, heartfelt and down-to-earth novel, a cult favorite, is about Maria, a trans woman who lives in New York City and works for a bookstore that sounds a lot like The Strand. When her life blows up, she steals a car and embarks on a cross-country road trip to Star City, Nevada. Maria is great company — she makes this crazy country feel like her own. Supply your own soundtrack. — DG
READ IF YOU LIKE: 'Idlewild,' by James Frankie Thomas; 'Housemates,' by Emma Copley Eisenberg.
Southwest: Martha's Gardens in Yuma, Ariz., for the best date shake. Northeast: Rein's Deli in Vernon, Ct. Try the Rachel and thank me later! — AJ
These days my favorite stop, on the way up to Maine, is Lobster Landing in Clinton, Ct., for its ideal (warm, buttery) lobster rolls. — DG
There's a big, modern rest stop on I-95 in Delaware that has a Burger King *and* a Panda Express. Because it has a huge arched roof over a glass structure, we've started calling it Winged Victory. — JS
SEEKING: STARDOM (HOLLYWOOD)
Anywhere but Here, by Mona Simpson (1986)
A mother and daughter from Wisconsin drive to Beverly Hills and mutual exasperation in Simpson's kaleidoscopic novel. Ann, 12, tries to manage the whims of her mother, the charismatic and reckless Adele, who treats Ann as a confidante and a show pony instead of the confused girl she is. Adele's sense of fun and pleasure outstrips her ability to pay for it: She is charming and maddening at once — a woman who doesn't know what to do with her thwarted dreams. — JS
READ IF YOU LIKE: 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette,' by Maria Semple; 'My Name is Lucy Barton,' by Elizabeth Strout; 'Terms of Endearment,' by Larry McMurtry.
SEEKING: stardom (Broadway)
Gypsy: A Memoir, by Gypsy Rose Lee (1957)
Madam Rose, the most (in)famously determined stage mother of all time, used to 'troupe' around with her young daughters by train, then by a secondhand Studebaker once owned by an undertaker. But when Mama's favorite runs off, it leaves awkward Louise — who became the famed stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, the author of this lightly embroidered, eponymous memoir — as the star of the show. This book itself had quite the taxi ride: it started as a 1943 New Yorker piece, and ended up adapted on Broadway.— AJ
READ IF YOU LIKE: 'Act One,' by Moss Hart; 'Striptease,' by Rachel Shteir; a double feature of 'Burlesque' and 'Showgirls.'
'In Such Good Company,' by Carol Burnett. Who wouldn't drive better with Carol Burnett on the passenger side? — AJ
'Hitch-22,' by Christopher Hitchens. He's the ideal, ironical reader of his own work. — DG
I can't say it's better than the book, but I love John le Carré's audiobook of his memoir, 'The Pigeon Tunnel.' He has such a charming, soothing voice — not a surprise for a former spy. He also does all the accents. (The only dud is the American one — too much twang.) — JS
SEEKING: THE GHOSTS OF THE PAST
Sing, Unburied, Sing, by Jesmyn Ward (2017)
Instead of embarking on the open road, a mixed-race family drives through haunted Southern terrain, from the Mississippi coast to the Delta and back. Jojo is 13; his sister, Kayla, is 3. Their mother is addicted to drugs and grieving the brother she lost. Driving to the prison where the children's father has just been released and their grandfather did time decades ago, they get stopped by a cop and are visited by a ghost. In Ward's moving and mournful novel, the struggles of the present are inextricable from the past. — JS
READ IF YOU LIKE: 'Beloved,' by Toni Morrison; 'As I Lay Dying,' by William Faulkner; 'Sinners.'
SEEKING: THE OTHER AMERICA
Blue Highways, by William Least Heat-Moon (1999)
Least Heat-Moon had just lost his job and his wife when he got into the 1975 Econoline he named Ghost Dancing and traveled eastbound out of Missouri, using back roads that old highway maps marked in blue. Looking for those little towns 'where change did not mean ruin and where time and men and deeds connected,' he encountered beauty, heartache, fellowship and loneliness. His voice is wry, companionable, attentive and intermittently grumpy — wonderfully suited to capturing the particularities of the terrain and the people he meets. — JS
READ IF YOU LIKE: 'In Patagonia,' by Bruce Chatwin; 'Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,' by James Agee; 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,' by Robert M. Pirsig.
'Tigerlily,' by Natalie Merchant. Pure nostalgia for me, but my teenager happens to like it too, which has put it at the top of the list, at least for now. — JS
The Philadelphia Sound. IYKYK! — AJ
If you mean albums only, I'd say John Hiatt's 'Slow Turning,' Amy LaVere's 'Stranger Me,' James McMurtry's 'Live in Aught-Three' and two by the Gourds — 'Dem's Good Beeble' and 'Stadium Blitzer.' But ask me tomorrow and the albums will be different. — DG
SEEKING: SAFETY
Driving the Green Book, by Alvin Hall (2023)
From 1936 to 1967, millions of Black motorists relied on 'The Negro Motorist Green Book,' a guide to where its readers could safely eat and sleep while on the road. This was a road trip guide of a different sort, and back issues of the Green Book, remnants of unfortunate national history, are unaccountably moving. In this book, Alvin Hall explores the history of the Green Books and goes on road trips himself, visiting places, like Montgomery's Ben Moore Hotel, where Black Americans have long felt welcome. The result feels like a homecoming. — DG
READ IF YOU LIKE: 'Negroland,' by Margo Jefferson; 'The Nickel Boys,' by Colson Whitehead.
SEEKING: A WAYWARD WIFE
The Dog of the South, by Charles Portis (1979)
'My wife Norma had run off with Guy Dupree and I was waiting around for the credit card billings to come in so I could see where they had gone.' So begins this frazzled yet eloquent novel that takes us, after the narrator packs up his Colt Cobra, from Arkansas down into Mexico and then Honduras. Portis, who also wrote 'True Grit,' is a marvelous observer — and this novel may be the fullest flowering of his particular kind of genius. The title refers to the name painted on a hippie wagon. The novel is a trip. — DG
READ IF YOU LIKE: 'The Dog of the North,' by Elizabeth McKenzie; 'So Far Gone,' by Jess Walter; anything by Joy Williams or Barry Hannah.
'The Price of Salt,' by Patricia Highsmith (1952). Seeking freedom, getting blackmailed. A dark mix of sex, repression and religion. — JS
'By Motor to the Golden Gate,' by Emily Post (1916). — AJ
'America Day by Day,' by Simone de Beauvoir (1948). It's an anodyne title for a quietly mesmerizing book. The French writer and philosopher, introspective by nature, travels by car, bus and train, clocking the nation's problems and absurdities, but also its joys. — DG
SEEKING: A SURROGATE MOTHER
Hearts, by Hilma Wolitzer (1980)
Daddy is dead — and your stepmother of six weeks is in charge of your future. What else can 13-year-old Robin Reismann do but hop in a car with Linda, who's only twice her age, has just learned to drive and — oh, by the way — is secretly, unintentionally pregnant? Set in post-women's lib, pre-Reagan America, 'Hearts' is about fraying and knotting family ties until they're as lumpily beautiful as macramé. It's the straightforwardly written story of a girl on the precipice of womanhood and a woman not ready to renounce her girlishness; it's about putting grief in a cooler and taking it to go, until it can be properly processed, far from what was home. — AJ
READ IF YOU LIKE: 'Tiger Eyes,' by Judy Blume; 'Fun Home,' by Alison Bechdel; the work of Laurie Colwin.
SEEKING: A STOLEN INHERITANCE
Cruddy, by Lynda Barry (1999)
The adolescent Holden Caulfield found things 'crumby.' Roberta Rohbeson, Barry's much less privileged 16-year-old, digs further down to 'cruddy.' Five years before, she stowed away with her father on a manic, booze-fueled homicidal spree that stopped at the slaughterhouse and climaxed in the Nevada desert. The riddle is how a trip darkened by abuse, gore and drugs — recalled with despair and a smattering of spookerific drawings by the author known for 'Ernie Pook's Comeek' strip — can be so very funny. — AJ
READ IF YOU LIKE: 'Bastard Out of Carolina,' by Dorothy Allison; 'Carrie,' by Stephen King; Quentin Tarantino movies.
SEEKING: THE UNDOCUMENTED
Lost Children Archive, by Valeria Luiselli (2019)
Road trips and children can be the stuff of narrative kitsch: ready-made motifs for freedom, coming of age and the American dream. Luiselli turns those conventions on their head in this formally inventive novel about a couple traveling from New York to Arizona, their marriage collapsing and their two children from previous relationships in tow. The husband, a 'documentarian,' is looking for the ancestral lands of the Apaches; the wife, a 'documentarist,' is looking for the undocumented children of a friend — two girls who crossed the border from Mexico. — JS
READ IF YOU LIKE: 'Enrique's Journey,' by Sonia Nazario; 'Signs Preceding the End of the World,' by Yuri Herrera; 'The Poisonwood Bible,' by Barbara Kingsolver; 'Solito,' by Javier Zamora.
SEEKING: ME TIME
All Fours, by Miranda July (2024)
A middle-age woman — doting mother, restless wife and 'semi-famous' artist — sets out to drive from her home in Los Angeles to New York and ends up checking into a motel in Monrovia, 30 minutes away. She spends thousands of dollars to redecorate the room according to her absurdly exacting specifications (botanical wallpaper, New Zealand wool carpet, tonka bean soap) and uses the time and solitude she carved out for her unconsummated road trip to stay put, learning more about who she is and what she wants. — JS
READ IF YOU LIKE: 'Don't Be a Stranger,' by Susan Minot; 'Fish Tales,' by Nettie Jones; 'Fear of Flying,' by Erica Jong.