Classic Road Literature

For readers with a wanderlust...

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L Frank Baum
After a cyclone transports her to the land of Oz, Dorothy and her dog Toto are befriended by a scarecrow, a tin man and a lion, who accompany her along the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City so as to find a wizard who can help her return home to Kansas.

Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes
Alonso Quixano is a country gentleman who has read so many stories of chivalry that he descends into fantasy and becomes convinced that he is a knight errant. Together with his earthy squire Sancho Panza, the self-styled "Don Quixote de la Mancha" sets out in search of adventure.

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
The old-but-still-wonderful story about a group of pilgrims going to Canterbury and the various tales that they relate to one another to pass the time. Hilarious, bawdy, melancholy, wonderful.

The Inferno by Dante
Part of a three-section work called The Divine Comedy, this is perhaps the most famous for its vivid images of eternal damnation and torture. The tale begins when the pilgrim Dante awakens in a dark wood with no memory of how he came to be lost. After he is chased by three beasts, he appeals the ghost of pagan poet Virgil, who tells Dante that the only way out is to follow the poet through the gates of hell, on which is inscribed the famous phrase, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here." Dante and Virgil then must descend deep into the abyss and confront its terrifying center: Satan himself.

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
The members of the Bundren family must take the body of Addie, matriarch of the family, to the town where Addie wanted to be buried. Along the way, we listen to each of the members on the macabre pilgrimage, while Faulkner heaps upon them various flavors of disaster.

On the Road by Jack Kerouac
The most famous of Jack Kerouac's works is not only the soul of the Beat movement and literature but one of the most important novels of the century. Like nearly all of Kerouac's writing, On The Road is thinly fictionalized autobiography filled with a cast made of Kerouac's real-life friends, lovers and fellow travelers.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
As they traverse the neon-lit American landscape, this novel unfolds as a satire of billboard America, progressive-school education and teenage mores; a commentary on Continental-American cultural relations; but above all as a moving love story, with Humbert captive to the cruel caprices of his indifferent child-mistress, Lolita.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
A modern Exodus about America's great trek as the hordes of dispossessed tenant farmers from the dust bowl turn their hopes to the promised land of California's fertile valley.

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
Bilbo Baggins, a respectable, well-to-do hobbit, lives comfortably in his hobbit-hole until the day the wandering wizard Gandalf chooses him to take part in an adventure from which he may never return.

Rabbit, Run by John Updike
Harry Angstrom was a star basketball player in high school, and that was the best time of his life. Now in his mid-20s, his work is unfulfilling, his marriage is moribund, and he tries to find happiness with another woman. But happiness is more elusive than a medal, and Harry must continue to run – from his wife, his life and from himself – until he reaches the end of the road and has to turn back.

Candide by Voltaire
After our hero is evicted from idyllic Westphalia for embracing Cunegonde, the Baron’s daughter, Candide is beset by one misfortune after another as he travels the globe, learning ultimately that “we must cultivate our garden.” Occasionally a political satire contains enough art and universal mirth to survive long after its timeliness has passed. Candide is such a book.

Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
This novel traces the cross-country journey of the long-suffering sci-fi writer Kilgore Trout, who is invited to attend an arts festival in a gritty Midwestern town; however, Kilgore finds to his horror that a Midwest car dealer is taking his fiction as truth. As Kilgore's picaresque adventure unfolds, Vonnegut drops in barbs on such contemporary American maladies as war, consumerism, racism and pollution.

Orlando by Virginia Woolf
Orlando enters the book as an Elizabethan nobleman and leaves the book three centuries and one change of gender later as a liberated woman of the 1920s. Along the way this most rambunctious of Woolf's characters engages in sword fights, trades barbs with 18th-century wits, has a baby and drives a car. This is a deliriously written book and a classic both of lesbian literature and the Western canon.