After the end of World War II, the American road trip began appearing prominently in literature, music, movies, and photography. Many photographers embarked on trips across the U.S. in order to create work, including Robert Frank, whose seminal 1955 road trip resulted in The Americans. However, he was preceded by Edward Weston, who traveled across the country taking pictures to illustrate Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass; Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose 1947 trip through the American South and into the West was published in the early 1950s in Harper's Bazaar; and Ed Ruscha, whose road trips between Los Angeles and Oklahoma later became Twentysix Gasoline Stations. Hundreds of photographers have continued the tradition of the photographic road trip on down to the present, from Stephen Shore to Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs. The Open Road considers the photographic road trip as a genre in and of itself, and presents the story of photographers for whom the American road is muse. The book features David Campany's introduction to the genre and eighteen chapters presented chronologically, each exploring one American road trip in depth through a portfolio of images and informative texts, highlighting some of the most important bodies of work made on the road from The Americans to present day.

A year out of high school in the early 1950s, New Jersey mechanic Buddy Palumbo falls in love with two things at once: race car driving with its speed and adventure, and his boss' niece, Miss Julie Finzio

Policing the Open Road examines how the rise of the car, that symbol of American personal freedom, inadvertently led to ever more intrusive policing--with disastrous consequences for racial equality in our criminal justice system. When Americans think of freedom, they often picture the open road. Yet nowhere are we more likely to encounter the long arm of the law than in our cars. Sarah Seo reveals how the rise of the automobile transformed American freedom in radical ways, leading us to accept--and expect--pervasive police power. As Policing the Open Road makes clear, this expectation has had far-reaching political and legal consequences.--

Fans of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, and Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love will enjoy author Toby Neal’s road trip travel memoir of self-discovery as she and her husband journey through the National Parks! I had a dream to live a “normal” life and I attained it; but along the way, I lost myself. My story began in Freckled: a Memoir of Growing up Wild in Hawaii, but it continued after I married the man of my dreams, completed my education with multiple degrees, had a successful career, and raised two beautiful children. I sacrificed to get to where I was. Though I didn’t regret anything, flat on my back in the doctor’s office on the cusp of my fiftieth birthday, my health was crumbling. I no longer recognized myself. I turned my head and saw a calendar on the wall: Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah beckoned me with its mysterious sandstone hoodoos. A road trip traveling through the National Parks was just what I needed to rediscover the girl I’d been; it could help me turn a corner into my new career as a writer, and my husband would enjoy a chance to photograph the natural wonders we saw. Sometimes, a twelve-thousand-mile road trip is also a personal quest. An absorbing travel narrative about defining and facing the limitations and opportunities of midlife.An absorbing travel narrative about defining and facing the limitations and opportunities of midlife. —Kirkus Reviews