By 1914, Theodore Dreiser was a successful writer with an international reputation, as well as a fixture on the New York literary scene. He had not been back to Indiana, his home state, in over twenty years when he was approached by his friend Franklin Booth, a respected and very successful artist, to make the trip together by automobile. The result is a narrative brimming with detail and the first modern work of American road literature, capturing the euphoric freedom to be found behind the wheel of a car.

By 1914, Theodore Dreiser was a successful writer living in New York. He had not been back to his home state in over 20 years. When his friend, the Indiana-born artist Franklin Booth, approached him with the idea of driving from New York to Indiana, Dreiser's response to Booth was immediate: "All my life I've been thinking of making a return trip to Indiana and writing a book about it". So was born the literary genre -- the American automobile road book. Along the route, Dreiser recorded his impressions of the people and land in words while his traveling companion sketched some of these scenes. In this reflective tale, Dreiser and Booth cross four states, covering 2,000 miles in two weeks, to arrive at Indiana and the sites and memories of Dreiser's early life in Terre Haute, Sullivan, Evansville, Warsaw, and his year at Indiana University. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1916 Edition.

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1916 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XLIV THE FOLKS AT CARMEL The run to Carmel, Franklin's home, was not long --say, forty miles--and we made it in a downpour and were silent most of the way. It was so dark and damp and gloomy that no one seemed to want to talk, and yet I took a melancholy comfort in considering how absolutely cheerless the day was. I could not help reflecting, as we sped along, how at its worst life persistently develops charm, so that if one were compelled to live always in so gloomy a world, one would shortly become inured to it, or the race would, and think nothing of it. Once Speed called my attention to a group of cattle with their heads to wind and rain, and asked, "Do you know why they stand that way?" "No," I replied. "Well, all animals turn their fighting end to any trouble. If those were horses, now, their rump would be to the rain." "I see," I said. "They fight with their heels." "Like some soldiers," said Franklin drily. In another place we saw another great stretch of beech woods, silvery in the rain, and Franklin commented on the characteristic presence of these groves everywhere in Indiana. There was one near his home, he said, and there had been one in every town I had ever lived in in this state. At dusk we reached Westfield, only six miles from his home, where the Quakers lived. This was one of those typical community towns, with standardized cottages of grey-white wood and rather stately trees in orderly rows. Because of a difficulty here with one of the lamps, which would not light, we had to stop a while, until it grew quite dark. A lost chicken ran crying out of a neighboring cornfield, and we shooed it back towards its supposed home, wondering whether the rain and wind or some night prowler would not kill it. It was very...

By 1914, Theodore Dreiser was a successful writer living in New York. He had not been back to his home state in over 20 years. When his friend Franklin Booth approached him with the idea of driving from New York to Indiana, Dreiser's response to Booth was immediate: "All my life I've been thinking of making a return trip to Indiana and writing a book about it." Along the route, Dreiser recorded his impressions of the people and land in words while his traveling companion sketched some of these scenes. In this reflective tale, Dreiser and Booth cross four states to arrive at Indiana and the sites and memories of Dreiser's early life in Terre Haute, Sullivan, Evansville, Warsaw, and his one year at Indiana University. "Because [the book] provides a portrait of the artist as a young man and describes the nation as a mosaic of individual cultures, Dreiser's journey offers several different lessons. Part travelogue, part autobiography, part collection of essays, A Hoosier Holiday lays out the landscape of a nation that ceased to exist once the highway unfurled across the map." -Publishers Weekly