John Green once wrote that road trips are “like doing something without actually doing anything.” Steinbeck agreed with this sentiment: “People don’t take trips, trips take people.” Maybe this common quality of passive movement explains why travel and literature are so intimately connected. We love to be swept along while sitting still, to see the world without breaking a sweat. Whether you need a way to pass long hours in the passenger seat or an escape from all the sameness at home, we’ve collected the best of classic and contemporary travel literature to whisk you away and inspire you to hit the road yourself. Fiction and nonfiction are represented here, highbrow and lowbrow — the only thing these books share is their ability to make your hair fly and your stomach lurch. That’s how you know the car is moving.
Travels with Charley: In Search of America by John Steinbeck
A gentle, late in life Steinbeck leads this nonfiction account of his 10,000 mile journey from New York to California and back again with his beloved poodle, the titular Charley. Along the way, Steinbeck finds plenty of beauty, hospitality and a fair share of suspicious strangers, but his greater mission is to answer the question “What are Americans like today?” At 58 years old in 1960, the great novelist’s career was slowing down, as was his health, all of which lends his reflections a nostalgic, melancholy tone. Still, his powers of observation were sharp as ever, and much of his impressions feel as true now as ever.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
If you like a dose of Eastern philosophy with your travelogue, Pirsig’s 1974 fictionalized autobiography has you covered. Descriptions of the passing landscape in Montana and California are punctuated with ruminations on the self, relationships, rationality and romanticism. Reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is like taking a road trip with a wise mentor who also happens to be a great mechanic. It’s a cheap and easy path to a quick spiritual tune-up.
Wild by Cheryl Strayed
Wild isn’t your typical freeway fantasy. Rather, it’s a memoir of the author’s 1,100-mile hike on the Pacific Crest Trail, a journey from the parched heart of the Mojave Desert to the majestic Bridge of the Gods in Washington state. Much of the book takes place in flashbacks as Strayed recounts the trauma and grief that led her to attempt such a trek with no prior hiking experience. Though it’s more of a trail trip than a road trip book, Strayed’s writing captures the scope of the thru-hiking experience and the depth of her catharsis as well as any travel story. The 2014 film adaptation with Reese Witherspoon is a worthy companion piece.
Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon
Like so many autobiographical travel books, Blue Highways starts with disaster. The author, a middle-aged English professor at the University of Missouri, loses his job and his marriage almost simultaneously, prompting a soul-searching drive over 13,000 miles of “blue highways,” the author’s term for small, out-of-the-way roads. As a portrait of rural America in 1978, Least Heat-Moon’s writing lovingly renders the many oddball characters he meets along the way, including an evangelical hitchhiker, a Nevada prostitute and a maple syrup farmer. The earnestness of his quest and his simple, unpretentious prose style will charm you right away.
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The granddaddy of American road trip novels is also our second Steinbeck pick, and for good reason. Steinbeck lived to see the rise and fall and resurrection of the American economy, and in The Grapes of Wrath he sets his sights on the Great Depression and the westward journey taken by so many farmers seeking their fortunes in California. The novel’s protagonist, Tom Joad, became literary royalty in part thanks to songs by Woody Guthrie and Bruce Springsteen, and the success of the film adaptation cemented the book’s place in popular culture. It’s not a joyride, but this tale of Dust Bowl farmers on the “mother road” is essential reading.
Boys of the Beast by Monica Zepeda
The lightest, breeziest title on our list, Boys of the Beast follows three teen cousins as they transport their Grandma Lupe’s 1988 Thunderbird (“the beast”) from Portland, Ore. to Albuquerque, N.M. In short, accessible chapters, the novel zips between the cousins’ perspectives, revealing how much they have in common despite their superficial differences. Zepeda’s debut Young Adult novel, Boys of the Beast updates the trope of young boys on a cross-country adventure for a modern audience.
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
The quintessential road trip book, On the Road was the starting pistol that set the Beat generation into motion. As a thinly fictionalized account of Kerouac’s friendships with Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, it’s also a window into the raucous youth of some of the postwar era’s greatest literary minds. Its publication in 1957 caused a massive backlash for its candid depictions of an unseemly counterculture bent on drinking, smoking, dancing and zig-zagging all around the country. There’s not much more to say for the plot, but the joy of Kerouac’s writing is more in its breathless style anyway.
