Transportation through the Lens of Literature

Imaginative literature can, and often does, give a special insight into society and its institutions which is not available from other sources. Unlike a history, or the official documents which are history's typical sources, literature locates the world at the individual, family, or intimate group level. Unlike private diaries or memoirs, fiction, drama, and poetry are consciously contrived to make up a good story and they show imaginative control. Of course, literature is made up, invented - but so, in their own ways, are corporate documents and diaries. The real or objective picture is inevitably a composite which the reader or listener puts together - it is not out there, in a particular source. These works of literature give us insiders', travelers' views. Obviously formal histories might cover the same path by using private writings such as journals and diaries, and, in doing so, could include a wider scope of travellers, transportation workers, and casual observers. While these sources could be more diverse, it's not clear that they would be any less biased or authentic than what we can get from poetry or fiction.

This book is chiefly a chronological traverse through a wide variety of American literature from 1800.htm to the present. From reading the story we have put together, you will see how people reacted to new transportation systems, what they perceived as their good and bad features, and how they dealt with a succession of systems. The book begins with an "Overture," which, like the orchestral piece before an opera, strikes the major and themes and findings from a historical and then a literary point of view. Finally, the introduction ends with some practical advice on what the reading of literature teaches us about transportation in America.

What We Tried to Do

For the past two centuries novels, poems, and plays have helped shape America's understanding and appreciation of its transportation systems. Walt Whitman, writing in 1871 at the openings of the Suez Canal and the U.S. transcontinental railroad, saw those two "passages to India" as welding the earth together: "Nature and Man shall be disjoin'd and diffused no more" and Occident and Orient would connect. As new modes of transportation were developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, novelists and poets tried to capture their cultural significance. An elderly couple in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables (1851) rides the train for the first time, and one of the pair, Clifford Pyncheon, talks to others in the carriage about a new "nomadic state" fostered by the railroad which will remove all stumbling blocks to happiness and spiritual improvement. In contrast, by the 1920s, such prophesies seemed empty to some writers. F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example, describes a place near New York City where rail, automobile, and barge traffic converge as a "valley of ashes," a wasteland setting for the moral decay and faded idealism of urban culture (The Great Gatsby, 1925). And, in The Grapes of Wrath (1939), John Steinbeck makes the road west by automobile both the way to flee the depression dust bowl and the way to enter the political and economic oppression of the "Hoovervilles" in California.

This site does two main things. First, it is a survey of what American literature has said about transportation. Second, through its chronological arrangement, it provides a history of the country's changing and interacting systems. And, yes, sotto voce, it has a third goal. We would like you to become intrigued by the works we present and appreciate the role which literature plays in our social and intellectual culture.

We have presented the relevant parts of novels, poems, and plays with the hope that you will see how imaginative writing highlights the infrastructure, the environment, where "environment" is construed broadly to include how transportation interacts with the general society, and how it is perceived by individuals. Of course, characterizing societies and individuals is the mainstay of imaginative literature which makes up stories, expresses emotions, and invents landscapes in complex ways. And then there is the unique contribution of literature - its penchant for finding new ways to use the English language to convey thoughts and feelings.

We imagine our reader to be a person who has a professional or personal interest in the transportation environment, especially in its social context. To this end, we have tried to capture the experience that such a person would have in reading a literary work with his or her special interests and concerns. We are not writing chiefly for the literary scholar or the historian. Our imagined readers go to literature first for entertainment - to follow the plot and identify with the characters, and for the artists' creative visions of the world. They also read for excellent language and original metaphors which provide insight into people and the society. Our entries, then, put a high premium on allowing the artists' words to come through as much as possible.

We are especially interested in showing how the perspective of literary study can shed light on a technical topic like transportation and on the public policy issues which surround it. This project should expand the ways that the professional looks at the role of transportation systems and the society which they serve. These windows into past and current attitudes can also give us insights into the future, not, of course, for the technical innovations, but for public perceptions and acceptance. Furthermore, we envision another audience, especially among the general public and policy makers, that should find our approach much more accessible than that of technical papers from the applied and social sciences. Put another way, this study suggests new ways to talk and write about what transportation means to society.

Our initial goal was to survey widely-available, famous American literature carefully. We have thus included selections and authors found in anthologies, on high school and college reading lists, and in public libraries and bookstores. Literary scholars have debated extensively about what qualifies as literature, and what belongs in textbooks or in the "literature" section of the library or bookstore. This debate has frequently pointed out that the category changed radically toward the end of the nineteenth century. Before then, almost anything that was written with some care and that was still being read after its author's death was called literature - including all poems, plays, prose romances, and highly embellished histories and philosophical treatises (1). Since then, many social and economic forces, including the invention of English departments in American and European colleges, universities, and normal schools, the incredible number of books published each year and the need to market to readers' special interests, have narrowed the term. Within schools and colleges, literature departments had settled on a fairly limited number of readings which helped the faculty control admissions and certification. We, however, have consciously expanded the view to show the diversity of literature, to go beyond high-profile, anthologized works. Therefore, we have included samples of popular literature in several flavors - children's books, detective and Western novels, and romances, blues and ballads.

The entries include relatively little "non-fiction," but even there the issue is murky. Frank Norris's novel The Octopus is, of course a fictional work, but Norris consciously includes extensive economic and political background on the California railway industry. On the other hand, Tom Wolfe's histories of the 1960s, such as Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby and Electric Kood-Aid Acid Test, with their stylistic ornamentation and embellishments, easily fit our definition. Other, more traditional histories are not part of the sample. Private writings which authors did not intend for publication - letters, journals, and diaries - are excluded, not because these are not literature, but because we focus on writing clearly made available to the public.

This study concentrates on the movement of civilians and goods along more or less public pathways. It does not deal with what goes on within plant grounds, on a farm, or in the driveway. Nor does it include commercial vehicles which operate off the public pathways - tractors, combines, and crop-dusting airplanes. No military settings, either - no troop trains, battleships, or tanks. Coverage of American literature which focuses on travel on other continents is limited.

Despite serious temptations, we did not cover science fiction stories which depict travel with purely imaginary machines. Speculative accounts of how rocket ships negotiate through the atmosphere of Venus are beyond the realistic or lyrical approaches of what we have included. Finally, we restricted ourselves to printed texts and have not tried to deal with movies, television, or radio; these continuous media present significant methodological difficulties. Nathaniel Hawthorne uses one phrase to get Phoebe Pyncheon off an omnibus. A moving picture or television shot would have to include horses, a street and (perhaps) a sidewalk, sides on the bus, all invented or reconstructed by a twentieth-century set designer, and it is not at all obvious what the writer or director sees as being significant among megabytes of video information.

While we have surveyed a wide range of literary works, we do not claim to have found or covered everything. Our point is to convey the flavor and the range of American writing. For example, Frank P. Donovan, Jr.'s The Railroad in Literature (1940) (2) lists about 250 books, as well as short stories, poems and songs. Of the books only about half are readily available in research libraries; most are mystery stories and many are children's books. As we progressed through this project, we kept thinking about other works we could have included, and we hope you will do the same. Our project is inevitably open-ended.

Part of the fun in our project has been the distortion it has placed on our general approach to literature - we now read the daily newspaper or monthly magazine and look approvingly when the authors explain how people or goods get from one place to another. We watch a young couple in a short story about to begin a courtship and wait expectantly to see how they get together: "Come on, Eugene, go to the station, and wait for her train!" Some famous writers turned out to be quite silent on our topic, and so they do not appear on these pages. The reader with specialized interests can consult the various indexes we have provided. In addition to the subject and geographical indexes, keyed to the entry number, the contents are also presented by author, title, and the date of setting. This latter represents the basic organization of this site.

Approaches

In the entries for each book, collection, or smaller work, we have tried to look at all aspects of transportation, from the vehicles themselves, to the infrastructure of roadways and terminals, to the logistics, for example, of getting baggage on or off a bus or railway carriage, to the social customs which travellers obey or flaunt. The entries also give enough of the context to show how transportation fits into the scene. This process has led us to look more closely at narrative paragraphs and longer character speeches than at dialogue or passages which present characters' emotions, states of mind, motivations, and philosophies.

We first thought to arrange this site according to transportation systems - a chapter on canals, big ones on the railroads and automobiles, and one on airplanes. This is the way most histories of transportation are arranged. It soon became clear that this wouldn't work. As soon as Americans had more choices than walking or horseback most trips in literature (and in the world) involved more than one mode - a stage coach to the ferry, then across town by streetcar to the train station.

• "One could not ask May, at the close of a winter afternoon, to go alone across the ferry to Jersey City, even in her own carriage…" to meet Madame Olenska arriving on the Washington, DC train. (Wharton, The Age of Innocence, 1920; 1870s setting)

• At the Bonneville California train station at the turn of this century: "The Yosemite 'bus and City 'bus passed up the street, on the way from the morning train… The electric car line, the city's boast, did a brisk business, its cars whirring from end to end of the street, with a jangling of bells and a moaning plaint of gearing." (Frank Norris, 1901)

The entries are arranged chronologically, by decade of their setting. By reading this book from cover to cover you will get an interesting picture of how transportation systems changed, began, and (sometimes) died. One clear message is the striking complexity which arose in the decades after the Civil War with the development of alternative ways to get around. Before that war, most citizens walked. A few had access to a horse; fewer could use some kind of wagon or carriage on a regular basis. A ride on a canal boat, steam boat, or train was for most people quite rare - often once in a lifetime, to a particular destination. It probably won't be surprising that the railroad is the dominant mode of transportation in these pages between its appearance in the 1840s until the first quarter of this century. After that, the automobile, having replaced horse-drawn vehicles, became the chief topic for literary treatment (3).

This chronology implies a succession, perhaps a "logical" succession, of transportation systems in what we would now call a "developing country," i.e., the United States from after the Civil War to the 1920s. Changes in transportation technology were relatively abrupt and not continuous, especially when viewed from a particular city or region. Once the Erie Canal was built, or the "thundering subway" in New York (Charles Norris, 1923) was completed, they made sudden and often dramatic changes in its region, often in the whole country.

The student of a particular technology or region of the country can inquire of our data whether important patterns or events are reflected or not. In addition to the place index, each entry has a "Systems" line and a "Context" line which gives the years covered and the main locales (4). It is important to recognize that writers don't come from every region, nor do they care to depict every city. While it is easy to follow developments in New York city from Herman Melville in the 1850s, to Edith Wharton in the 1870s and William Dean Howells in the 1880s, to J. D. Salinger in the 1940s, no other city had such a comprehensive transportation (or literary) history. Because of her background, Willa Cather gives pictures of Nebraska and Wyoming, and Sinclair Lewis concentrated on Minnesota, while none of our entries touches significantly on Denver or Seattle, Alabama or Kansas (5).

What We Found Out about History

The histories of the railroad (especially) and the automobile are richly demonstrated in American literature. Literary approaches typically have a detailed and personal focus, so the major movements of culture and history tend to be shown at the personal, family, or local level. We are often invited to infer a general picture from what is, in effect, a "case history."

Early reactions to new systems

Some authors waxed enthusiastic, sometimes poetic, upon the introductions of the railroad, elevated train, automobile, and airplane.

• "Ah, here comes the down-train: white cars, flashing through the trees like a vein of silver. How cheerfully the steam-pipe chirps! Gay are the passengers. There waves a handkerchief - going down to the city to eat oysters, and see their friends, and drop in at the circus." (Melville, "Cock-a-Doodle-Doo…" 1855)

• A young couple, just arrived in New York sees "the train, just starting, throbbed out the flame-shot steam into the white moonlight." "The most beautiful thing in New York - the one always and certainly beautiful thing here,' said March; and his wife sighed, 'Yes, yes.'" (Howells, Hazard, 1920, 1880s setting)

• The hero's father's 1913 Ford, "purchase of an inspired hour of madness, occupant now of half Gant's conversation, object of abuse, boast, and anathema." (Wolfe, Look Homeward, 1929)

• "To George F. Babbitt, as to most prosperous citizens of Zenith, his motor car was poetry and tragedy, love and heroism." The prospect of a new purchase "was much more than a study of transportation. It was an aspiration for knightly rank." (Lewis, Babbitt, 1922)

• Hart Crane on the Wrights' airplane: "Wheeled swiftly, wings emerge from larval-steel hangers. Taught motors surge, space gnawing, into peripheries of light…" (1933)

In some cases writers of stories, poems, and plays consciously conveyed new information to many of their readers, telling them about transportation systems, especially urban ones, that they had never seen. These works were elaborately descriptive of both the technical details (what the stations are like, the noises), as well as the social changes (who rides, how much it costs, where people go). Such news could have struck a responsive chord in the hearts of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century urban leaders as they charted a course toward Progress. Of course, people could read about developments in London and Paris, as well as New York, in illustrated magazines such as Harper's and Atlantic; and they could see Progress when they traveled at home and overseas.

In the final decades of the nineteenth century, transcontinental railroads opened up lands for commerce and development, and streetcar lines expanded the scope of cities. Some novelists describe these patterns, picking up the notions of the literal frontier out West and the suburban frontiers at the city's edge. Aside from the fact that rail travel was more interesting and accessible than the canal or the carriage, it grew up and proliferated with the country's striking demographic spread. As a public system, it was also perceived to be somewhat personalized with an agreeable combination of privacy and social contact. Notice, however, that many of the examples are told in retrospect from the 1920s, so the enthusiasm also reflects the later era's attitudes.

• The Archers have a reserved compartment for their honeymoon to upstate New York; the train, "shaking off the endless wooden suburbs, had pushed out into the pale landscape of spring." (Wharton, 1920; 1870s setting)

• "One fine day a strange monster came writhing westward over the prairie, from Worthington to Luverne [another 30 miles]; it was the greatest and most memorable event that had yet happened in these parts.… People felt that day a joy that almost frightened them; for it seemed now that all their troubles were over, that there could be no more hardships to contend with." (Rölvaag, 1925; 1870s setting in South Dakota)

• The social and psychological limits of urbanization are defined by the reaches of its fixed-rail transportation system when the Marches ride to the end of the West Side line where they "saw the city pushing its way by regular advances into the country." (Howells, 1890; 1880s setting)

• The railroad president in The Octopus explains: "try to believe this - to begin with - that Railroads build themselves. Where there is a demand sooner or later there will be a supply… Do I build the Railroad? You are dealing with forces, young man, when you speak of Wheat and the Railroads, not with men… the Wheat will be carried to feed the people as inevitably as it will grow." (F. Norris, 1901)

• "Its rails extended down the valleys. New towns sprung up, new sections were opened and populated, for the company had to create customers to get custom. The long Salinas Valley was part of the exploitation." Later, "when the railroad puts a branch out here" they can ship out their oak logs. (Steinbeck, 1952; 1900s setting)

While proliferation of highways and streets in the twentieth century turned out to be more expensive and more extensive than the railroads, literature is rather silent about what we now call the automobile infrastructure.

• Lewis's Babbitt is an exception. As a real estate investor, he uses his involvement in a political campaign to get "advance information about the extension of paved highways" to buy land. (1922)

Not all of the early descriptions were so enthusiastic, especially when the effects of a new technology on the local neighborhoods were brought out. Railroads were (and are) notorious for taking rich passengers through poor districts.

• "Straight as a die the railroad cut it; many times a day tantalizing the wretched shanty with the sight of all the beauty, rank, fashion, health, trunks, silver and gold, drygoods and groceries, brides and grooms, happy wives and husbands, flying by the lonely door - no time to stop - flash! here they are - and there they go! - out of sight at both ends - as if that part of the world were only made to fly over, and not to settle upon. And this was about all the shanty saw of what people call 'life.'" (Melville, "Cock-a-Doodle-Doo…" 1855)

• James in the Bostonians gives the view from Basil Ransom's New York apartment: "at the end of the truncated vista, of the fantastic skeleton of the Elevated Railway, overhanging the transverse longitudinal street, which it darkened and smothered with the immeasurable spinal column and myriad clutching paws of an antediluvian monster." In the same novel Boston's poor neighborhoods "gave a collective impression of boards and tin and frozen earth, sheds and rotting piles, railwaylines striding flat across a thoroughfare of puddles, and tracks of the humbler, the universal horsecar, traversing obliquely this path of danger." (1886; 1870s setting)

Disadvantages and advantages

In addition to the obvious point that trains and automobiles move people and goods around more efficiently than what was previously available, authors also talked about how they brought families and friends together, or how mobility increased alienation. In contrast to general optimism, we do get some hints about the dangers and travails of building transportation systems. Folk songs and, especially, the blues give several images of men who have "been workin' on the railroad all the livelong day" and yet will probably never ride on a train. A sense of economic injustice was outlined rather early in Henry David Thoreau's discussion of railway building:

• We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers [ties] are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. (Walden, 1854)

• Melville expresses a similar view concerning "the engineering forces employed in the construction of the American Canals and Railroads… the native American liberally provides the brains, and the rest of the world as generously supplying the muscles." (Moby-Dick, 1850)

• It ain't no telling what that train won't do, / It'll take your baby and run right over you. / Now that engineerman ought to be 'shamed of hisself. / Take women from their husbands, babies from their mother's breast.

(McCoy, "That Lonesome Train Took My Baby Away") 

Through twentieth-century hindsight the damage done to the Chinese men who built the Union Pacific was reflected by Shawn Hsu Wong, Maxine Hong Kingston, and John Steinbeck. The devastating impact of the railroads on Native Americans got scant attention. An exception is at the end of Zane Grey's retrospective The U. P. Trail (1918):

• "This beast that puffed smoke and spat fire and shrieked like a devil of an alien tribe… Those white men were many as the needles of the pines. They fought and died, but always others came." The train is "a symbol of the destiny of the Indian - vanishing - vanishing - vanishing - "

In the South of the twentieth century, the use of black convict road gangs to build highways was noticed and deplored by Langston Hughes, Robert Penn Warren, and others.

• Makin' a road
For the rich old white men
To sweep over in their big cars
And leave me standin' here. (Hughes, "Florida Road Workers")

The money-conscious realism of late nineteenth and early twentieth century analyzes the big economic picture, the railroad trusts.

• "The generation between 1865 and 1895 was already mortgaged to the railways." (H. Adams, 1918)

• Owen Wister notices of the Northern Pacific "the whole thing was sired by a whole doggone Dutch [German] syndicate." (1902, 1874-1890 setting)

• Silas Lapham's midwestern mill is liable to control by a fictional railroad which is "the only road that runs within fifty miles of the mills, and you can't get a foot of lumber nor a pound of flour to market any other way." (Howells, 1885; 1875 setting)

• In The Octopus the railroad's chief operative in the San Joaquin valley simply describes the freight rate as "All-the-traffic-will-bear." The railroad takes advantage of its monopoly, as well as its ownership of half of the land along the right of way to control prices and as well as rents. Not surprisingly images of the train itself are unpleasant, "a locomotive, single, unattached, shot by him with a roar, filling the air with the reed of hot oil, vomiting smoke and sparks." The power extends horizontally to intra-urban systems as well where the railroad's name is "upon the street-railway cars, upon the ferryboats, on the locomotives and way-coaches of the local trains." (F. Norris, 1901)

• "The power which really governs the United States today is the Railroad Trust. It is the Railroad Trust that runs your state government, wherever you live, and that runs the United States Senate. And all of the trusts that I have named are railroad trusts - save only the Beef Trust! The Beef Trust has defied the railroads - it is plundering them day by day through the Private Car." (Sinclair, The Jungle 1905)

The economic systems that bankrolled and organized automobile or airplane companies, or the highways and airports were seldom mentioned in the literature we surveyed. For most authors, these systems were quasi-mystical "givens"; they appeared at the door or at the end of town, and the characters either could or could not afford the ticket, cab fare, or a tank of gas. When they examined costs at all, most twentieth-century authors restricted their complaints to the personal level.

• The family's first car in Look Homeward, Angel: "Each bill for gasoline, repairs, or equipment brought a howl of anguish from him; a puncture, a breakdown, a minor disorder caused him to circle about in maddened strides, cursing, praying, weeping." (Wolfe, 1929; 1910s setting)

If authors and the characters whom they invented represent typical citizens, Americans have not cared much about the technical details of transportation systems. For example, while the nineteenth century had several identifiable types of wagons and carriages - buckboard, hansom, barouche, dray - these distinctions were rarely made in literature. The transition from coal to diesel locomotives was a major event for the railroad industry but literary travelers rarely notice that a train has a locomotive, much less its fuel availability or efficiency. As early as the 1910s, once the Model T dominance was over, brand names of cars were frequently mentioned, but chiefly to clarify social and economic class. Later, especially in southwest settings, ownership of pickup trucks became an important social-class symbol. Even though most authors accepted commercial stereotypes about automobile ownership, they rarely focused on the kind of details about cylinders and camshafts, upholstery and color patterns that are the keynotes of advertisements. For cars, brand name alone is the salient token.

• In Thomas Wolfe's North Carolina, the Model-T is given a glamorous aura: "Bouncing tinnily down the coiling road that came through the Gap from the town, a flivver glinted momently through the trees." The local millionaire has a Packard, while the main character only has a Ford. (1929; 1910s setting)

• Bigger Thomas is at first excited at the prospect of driving a wealthy man's car: "He hoped it would be a Packard, or a Lincoln, or a Rolls Royce. Boy! Would he drive!" but the dark blue Buick is "not so expensive as he had hoped," Bigger finds driving an unprecedented rush: "He had a keen sense of power when driving; the feel of a car added something to him." (Wright, Native Son, 1940)

• The punks in Last Exit to Brooklyn are "Watching cars roll by. Identifying them. Make. Model. Year. Horse power. Overhead valve. V-8. 6,8, a hundred cylinders… Cant beat a Plymouth fora pickup… Outrun any cop in the city with a Roadmaster…" (Selby, 1965; 1950s setting)

• The extensive catalogue in Last Picture Show includes the young hero's '41 Chevrolet pickup, the big shot's Mercury ("best car in the country"), a farmer's red GMC pickup, the lovely and wealthy girl's white Ford convertible and her mother's big blue Cadillac, the night watchman's old white Nash, as well as the "first Ford Thunderbird in that part of the country." (McMurtry, 1966; 1950s setting)

Accidents litter the landscape of American literature. Steamboat groundings and crashes punctuate Mark Twain's tales. There are occasional carriage mishaps, owing to equipment failure more often than careless driving. Accidents really took on a literary impact with the motor car, and they became important from the early 1920s on. Auto accidents are personal. They involve the driver as an identifiable agent who is somehow personally responsible for the event - the narrator of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby calls accident causers "careless people," and he links their driving to their immoral behavior. Karl Shapiro links the gruesome details, "the mangled [are] lifted / And stowed into the little hospital," with a sense of the wreck's pointlessness: "The grim joke and the banal resolution" ("Auto Wreck," 1942). Probably like most people, literary characters see these accidents as isolated events with profound impacts on the survivors, rather than seeing them as part of accumulated annual carnage.

While it was a popular wonder that these systems were established in the first place, once they did exist, people came to depend on them. Laura Ingalls Wilder in The Long Winter (1940) gives a harrowing account of a Dakota town whose food supplies in the winter of 1877-78 are stuck by massive snow drifts on the rail line from October to April. Because they had abandoned subsistence farming, their harvest has been shipped out and they resorted to eating their seed grain to survive. Even Sinclair Lewis's Gopher Prairie (Main Street, 1922) becomes "motor-paralyzed" in winter, and people must return to horse-drawn sleighs to get around town. An extensive treatment of the topic of dependency is in George Stewart's fascinating Storm (1941) which details the cascading effects of a national storm on plane, rail, and highway; his book should be consulted by specialists who are concerned with disaster relief, since the basic situation has changed little since the late 1930s. In one of his stories, J. D. Salinger points out the difficulty Long Islanders have in arranging their schedules around the last commuter train out of the city, the unstated consequences of which are having to find a hotel room (if they're lucky) in a place perceived to be extremely dangerous ("Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes," 1953). Finally, we have Stephen King's grotesque situation of a rabid dog trapping a terrified mother and her young son in a stalled Pinto (Cujo, 1981).

Succession of systems

In the middle of the nineteenth century, water-based travel and commerce through canals and on riverboats were challenged by the railroad, and American writers became variously sentimental or regretful of the changes. After the Civil War, especially in the 1870s, the Eastern cities of Boston and New York developed choices of ways to get around town. The presence of parallel, competing systems was in contrast to smaller cities and rural settings up to the early twentieth century where the choices were often private carriages or walking. Literary accounts became a way to explore different riderships and their motivations. In some cases we can sketch out a small-scale history from a few texts.

For example, Mark Twain chronicles changes in the Mississippi river valley from the 1830s to the 1880s. Huck Finn focuses on the raft which floats rather passively downstream, with an occasional interaction with steamboats and other river traffic. The first part of Life on the Mississippi gives an extended picture of the pilot's training during the "flush times" of steamboating in the late 1850s. This part ends with a discussion of the whole industry from the pilot's point of view, with emphasis on new professionalism and the development of a Pilot's Benevolent Association. The second half of this book, set in 1882, is a social and economic analysis of the decline of steamboating in the face of "the unholy train." Willa Cather's gentle portrait of Brownville, Nebraska in "A Resurrection" (1897) adds further details. Steamboats ironically caused their own demise by shipping in steel rails in the 1870s and thus put this steamboat-centered town off the map. Richard Bissell follows all this up with two novels depicting the life of a twentieth-century Mississippi river tugboat pilot who can see both trains and trucks whose roadways are down in the valley.

Several stories highlight the end of the era of horse-drawn vehicles, and their replacement by motor cars. William Faulkner's The Reivers dramatizes the initial shift from a horse culture to a car culture in rural Mississippi. The key incident occurs in 1904 when eleven-year-old Lucius Priest joins two of his grandfather's hired men in absconding with the grandfather's new car. The book recounts their trip to Memphis, the loss of the car, and the subsequent attempt through the ironic agency of a horse race to reacquire it. Looking back from the 1960s the now elderly Lucius sees the coming of the car as the beginning of the end of a way of life that he revered and now misses. Conflicting trends seemed evident from the start. The grandfather, a livery stable owner, foresaw a paved future financed by the banks, since "people will pay any price for motion… They will even work for it … We don't know why." His liveryman gives one explanation; in the first car he ever saw he finds "his soul's lily maid, the virgin's love of his rough and innocent heart." Articulating America's so-called 'love affair' with the automobile in such terms also points to the notorious role of the back seat as the key to young peoples' sexual mobility.

After years of change, we get striking pictures of transportation systems built in multiple levels and layers. While these images are literally true of New York city, the concept of three-dimensional and intersecting transportation modes is metonymous for a modern nation's infrastructure.

• "There are very few horses left on the streets; their place is taken by taxicabs and private automobiles with shining brasswork that pant beside the curbs." (Marquand, 1936; set in the 1910s in New York)

• "Taxis spun and honked and two old-time closed carriages still in use rolled here and there, their curtains drawn." Later in New York state farming country, Clyde's girlfriend's father drives the "old family conveyance," a buggy, "at a time when excellent automobile roads were a commonplace elsewhere." (Dreiser, 1925; set in Kansas City a decade earlier)

• "The bus takes too long, while the subway is always crowded," so the characters take taxis. (West, Miss Lonelyhearts, 1933; set in contemporary New York)

• "For this is the country where the age of the internal combustion engine has come into its own. Where every boy is Barney Oldfield… Where the smell of gasoline and burning brake bands and red-eye is sweeter than myrrh." (Warren, All the King's Men, 1946; set in rural Louisiana in the 1930s)

And the multiple dimensions:

• In James' 1870s Boston, private carriages run on roadbeds which were designed for streetcars. "As they rolled toward the South End, in a good deal of silence, bouncing and bumping over the railway tracks very little less, after all, than if their wheels had been fitted to them" Even newer systems are available in New York "The beauty of the 'elevated' was that it took you up to the Park and brought you back in a few minutes, and you had all the rest of the hour to walk about and see the place." (The Bostonians)

• New York in the 1910s has the "clatter of L trains overhead" and the subway beneath: "elbows, packages, shoulders, buttocks, jiggled closer with every lurch of the screeching express." On the ground the "grinding rattle of wheels and scrape of hoofs on the cobblestones," and "a few rattling sounds of cabs and trolleycars squirmed in brokenly through the closed windows" of a hotel, with "two endless bands of automobiles that passed along the road in front of the station" and buses "crowded into line like elephants in a circusparade." (Dos Passos, 1925)

• Ellison creates a more personal and dynamic scene: "Along the walk the buildings rose, uniform and close together… Out of the grounds and up the street I found the bridge by which I'd come, but the stairs leading back to the car that crossed the top were too dizzily steep to climb, swim or fly, and I found a subway instead.… I dropped through the roar, giddy and vacuum-minded, sucked under and out into late afternoon Harlem" (Invisible Man, 1952; set in the 1930s)

Literature clearly gives the impression of there being a time in the late nineteenth century when the country was defined by New York City on the one hand, and everywhere else on the other. Characters in William Dean Howells' A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) and John Marquand 's The Late George Apley (1936) trace the movement of a perceived center of cultural gravity from Boston to New York. With the forward-looking, "progressive," urban anchors of New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, the "monstrous changes taking place in the world" that John Steinbeck saw happening in 1900 gradually radiate out to the various regions of the country. Stories of the middle west find Chicago as first the railroad hub in the 1890s, but later as an important, complex center on its own in Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900) and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906). The entries give a sense that, even well into the twentieth century, the rural areas, especially in the South, were bypassed by modern transportation.

Private ownership and public transportation

The train compartment and even the trolley were presented as the sites of social interaction, where strangers marveled about the passing scene or just groused about delays in the schedule. Waiting rooms were attractively furnished and people there talked with each other. On the trains, because coach-class cars allowed benches to face each other, four or more people could sit face-to-face, an arrangement giving families and strangers the chance to talk during the long trips. Several scenes show experienced travelers introducing their spouses and children to these institutions.

• A young, recently-married couple marvels at the parlor car, then on to the dining car with the "finest meal in the world." The coach has "dazzling fittings … sea-green figured velvet" and frescoes in olive and silver on the ceiling. (Crane, "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," 1894)

• The Union Station waiting room has frescoes depicting the early French explorers of the mid-west, benches of "ponderous mahogany," a marble newsstand with a brass grill, and other decorations which are almost identical to a hotel lobby. (Lewis, Babbitt, 1922)

• Charles Babbitt introduces his son to "the other sages of the Pullman smoking compartment" on their way to Chicago. (Lewis, 1922)

• Woodie Guthrie's song about the "train bound for glory" stipulates that it "don't carry no smoker."

• A grandfather showed his grandson the men's room, "demonstrated the ice-water cooler as if he had invented it," and took him to the diner, "the most elegant car in the train." We see, but the grandson doesn't quite understand, that the dining car is segregated - two tables "set off from the rest by a saffron-colored curtain." (O'Connor, "The Artificial Nigger," 1955)

From the first years of the railroads, African-Americans were excluded from these niceties owing successively to slavery, Jim Crow laws, and segregation. Jacobs, writing in 1861 about the 1840s, succinctly describes the circumstances from both a black's and a woman's perspective:

• "We were stowed away in a large, rough car, with windows on each side, too high for us to look out without standing up. It was crowded with people, apparently of all nations. There were plenty of beds and cradles, containing screaming and kicking babies. Every other man had a cigar or pipe in his mouth, and jugs of whiskey were handed round freely. The fumes of the whiskey and the dense tobacco smoke were sickening to my senses, and my mind was equally nauseated by the coarse jokes and ribald songs around me. It was a very disagreeable ride." (Jacobs 1861, setting in 1840)

White writers of this era did not often comment on segregated trains, or on the close quarters of lower-class coaches. The "emigrant's quarters" in the Mississippi river boat of Herman Melville's Confidence Man (1857) are described, but they were empty at the time, so they seemed more like a "dormitory" than a place where people might suffer.

Economic prosperity in the last quarter of the nineteenth century gave rise to much wider availability of private carriages. Several literary works from the 1870s and 1880s dramatized the freedom that privately owned and controlled transportation gave to the wealthy as they went about their business, conducted courtships and other sexual liaisons, and tried to keep their families together. Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence elaborated on the social and economic distance between those who could command private transportation and everyone else. Some owned or, in this novel at least, rarely rented one; others took streetcars.

• The wealthy Archers in the early part of the nineteenth century knew "everybody between the Battery and Canal Street: and only the people one knew had carriages." (Wharton, 1920; setting in the 1880s)

• The young narrator visits a couple who had romantically eloped to New York. During the visit she and Myra ride home from Central Park in a hansom and Myra expresses what the narrator calls "insane ambition… here, Mrs. Myra was wishing for a carriage - with stables and a house and servants, and all that went with a carriage!" (Cather, My Mortal Enemy, 1925; setting in the 1880s)

These stories, with their lovely portraits of private carriages for the urban wealthy, help to show the readiness of the United States for the automobile. In the rural west and midwest, private transportation wasn't even an option: carriages, buggies and later cars in various states of repair were essential for farm work and for doctors' rounds. Privacy was emphasized as most twentieth-century literature depicts automobiles as closed, little worlds.

• "There is nothing more alone than being in a car at night in the rain.… It is a vacation from being you. There is only the flow of the motor under your foot spinning that frail thread of sound out of its metal gut like a spider, that filament, that nexus, which isn't really there, between the you which you have just left in one place and the you which you will be when you get to the other place" (Warren, All the King's Men, 1946; set in 1933)

• The Hudson owned by the displaced migrant family during the depression is "the new hearth," since they sell everything they can to get it. (Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath, 1939)

• In O'Connor's Wise Blood (1952) the advantage of having a car is "of having something that moved fast, in privacy, to the place you wanted to be."

The ability for young couples to get away by car from their parents and chaperones is notorious. However, the situation obtained even before motorized vehicles were available. Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio showed young men renting buggies from the livery stable to take their girl friends out on special occasions. In Wharton's Summer, also set in 1890s, the young woman uses a rented bicycle to get to her trysts; her lover rents a carriage.

• The wealthy aunt in An American Tragedy complains about "too much dancing, cabereting, automobiling to one city and another, without due social supervision." (Dreiser, 1925)

• The Southern town is filled with boys "taking their girls to the country at night and on Sunday afternoons, and anybody knows what that means." (Saroyan, "Harry," 1941; set in the 1930s)

Missing systems

The historically important systems of canals, steamships, and airplanes are rarely found in American literature. It is possible to speculate that a combination of economic and artistic factors have contributed to this situation, but it's much harder to account for why artists avoid topics than why they treat them. (For example, maybe all the short stories about riding on the Erie Canal were poorly crafted and turned down by the editors.)

The relative absence of airplanes from these pages is puzzling. American writers do have a long-standing interest in the idea of flying, but, once scheduled airliners became a reality, literary interest waned. There are hints of a fascination with balloons in the nineteenth century. Edgar Allan Poe's "The Balloon-Hoax" (1844) parodies a newspaper account of a make-believe trans-Atlantic trip and "Hans Pfal" (1835) describes a ride across Holland. Later, Emily Dickinson's "You've seen Balloons set - Haven't You?" begins with a lyric description:

Their Liquid Feet go softly out / Upon a Sea of Blonde - / They spurn the Air, as 'twere too mean / For Creatures so renowned -

In other poems she talks of a balloon's path as being "Upon an Ether street" and refers to "Its soaring Residence." People occasionally wrote about dirigibles, presumably in the expectation that they would become a viable passenger vehicle. A character is Zane Grey's The Desert of Wheat (1919) visits New York city and writes back to his family in Washington, "An' up overhead a huge cigar-shaped balloon, an' then an airplane sailin' swift an' buzzin' like a bee. Then [sic] was the first airships I ever seen." This craft is mentioned also in John Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer (1925) and Rita Dove's poem, "The Zeppelin Factory," set in 1928. [The Hindenburg disaster in 1937 ended the zeppelin craze.]

Some fifty years after the first balloon poems, after a flurry of youthful enthusiasm in Stratemeyer and his Syndicate's boys' books of the late 1910s through about 1930, literary interest in the airplane seems almost to vanish. Civilian air travel failed to capture the imagination of many poets, playwrights, or novelists (6), despite its ongoing presence in moving pictures including, for example, "Flying Down to Rio" (1933) and "Passenger 57" (1992). One reason is that, even though commercial aviation has existed for decades, until the 1960s it chiefly served businessmen. Robert Serling's documentary novel Stewardess (1982) does dramatize the transition. We guess that, before cheap air fares, few writers had flown unless they were in the armed services. Once ticket prices fell, family and personal travel quickly became regular and ordinary, even for penniless poets. Even so, contemporary literature has few airplane scenes beyond the simple mention of a flight's taking place. Perhaps, plane trips aren't long enough for credible settings for conversation. Or maybe it's the ambiance of the plane - people strapped in place, all facing in the same direction like sitting in a theater waiting for the movie; narrow seats and narrow aisles preclude much on-board action. Publicly-funded airports never had the glamor of turn-of-the-century railway stations. In the past trains were not depicted as being perfect - accounts of scheduling delays, bumpy and noisy rides, lost luggage, and even an occasional accident recur throughout American literature. However, literature often gave pleasant images of the smokers, dining and parlor cars, in appreciation of the fact that most travelers' plans worked out, and in acknowledgment that the system as a whole was remarkable.

The great era of canals, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, is rarely represented in American literature. For one thing, the population was relatively small, so there were simply fewer writers. For another, canals were designed almost exclusively for freight handling - although (in Samuel Hopkins Adams' twentieth-century account [1959]) citizens could pay to ride at a few cents per mile. Some historians claim that east-west canals had a greater impact on national development and consciousness than did the railroad, despite the brevity of the time when canals had an exclusive presence. Perhaps the failure of canals to reach the literary (or public) imagination accounts for this neglect in most American histories (7).

Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Fools (1962, set in 1931) is unusual for treating luxury steamships. We had expected more, since this setting should work out well for a novelist or dramatist who would like to create a laboratory for social and psychological interactions in a small space (8). Perhaps the cost of such travel, especially in the twentieth century, gave few literary figures the chance to observe what went on. In several books, "Cunards" are in the background, but the trips themselves are not dramatized. James Baldwin's "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon" (1961) has a long passage on the young black actor's steamship ride back to the States from Paris. Another African-American writer, Paule Marshall, describes a Caribbean cruise (Praisesong for the Widow, 1984). In Baldwin's case, the trip is a kind of parody immigration which ends with traditional images of a welcoming New York harbor. Marshall uses the voyage as a symbol of the "middle passage" of slavery times (9).

Comments on history and literature

Is literature a better or worse source for history or for understanding the past than, say, statutes or corporate balance sheets? In the past two hundred years, American literature has focused on individual characters and has also emphasized the presence of the poet or the narrator as an identified speaker's voice. It has not taken much care to be "objective," but has gloried in subjective, personal views of the world. That trend is mitigated significantly by serious efforts by some artists to place their characters in "realistic" settings, in places where the reader's experience lets her or him enter the fictional world. We also need to recognize that historians' traditional documentary sources are quite a bit less than unvarnished Truth. The economic historian must be skeptical of balance sheets; the political historian can hardly accept statutes or legislative debates as neutral, unbiased accounts of reality (10).

Unlike the social sciences, literature is not systematic. There's no agreed-upon paradigm that a poet or novelist must follow to do a complete or satisfactory job. With no "discipline," literature can open up a wide range of topics and treatments.

What We Found Out about Literature

We close this overture with a few comments of interest chiefly to the literary scholar. This study focuses on setting, a topic addressed less often than character, narration, or theme. Based on this somewhat unusual view, we have suggestions. Scholars should attend to the precise moment in the culture which is being depicted.

American authors are rather precise about when they place their works in history. In our own lives, we know very well that the 1960s feel different from the 50s and the 70s, and, depending on our age, we are aware of anachronisms and implausibilities. For the nineteenth century, most literary histories and anthologies typically distinguish only between pre- and post-Civil War America and assume a kind of uniformity which the writers from those eras did not share. Walt Whitman's three key poems, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," (1855) "When Lilacs…," (1866) and "Passage to India" (1871) are fifteen years apart in composition but they reflect both different technologies and views of the world - the first poem is focused on New York city, the middle poem is national, and "Passage" is global.

It also matters whether a story is about the writer's contemporary culture or is retrospective. Some writers, like Henry David Thoreau, give detailed accounts of their own times and focus on those events which occurred while they were active writers. Others, like Mark Twain and Willa Cather, bring together events from throughout their lives, placing some of their works during their childhood and others in their adult years. Finally, a few American writers like William Faulkner, range freely over more than a century of American events and quite consciously set out to reconstruct the past.

William Dean Howells' Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) and Faulkner's Go Down, Moses (1942) treat the 1880s. But Faulkner knows "how it turned out"; indeed, a final chapter of his novel, "Delta Autumn," is a nearly documentary account of the effect of the automobile and the highway on the wilderness he had discussed in "The Bear," a wilderness which had earlier been reached with difficulty by wagon, but which in the 1940s is accessible by paved highway. Howells reflects his age's enthusiasm for New York's new elevated trains, gaily painted omnibuses, taxis, and paved streets - in contrast to the slower-paced Boston which the fictional Marches had left.

In a moment of playful anachronism, Edith Wharton in Age of Innocence, written in 1920 about the 1870s, has a passage toward the end where Newland "prophetically" anticipates a tunnel under the Hudson linking the Washington-to-Jersey City train line to Manhattan, five-day Atlantic crossings, and airships for passengers - the final chapter, set about 1905, "shows" that these "Arabian Night marvels" to have come true - Wharton's contemporary readers of course would have recognized the full social consequences of these developments which had taken place in their own lives.

The difference between the fictional events and the time of publication can lead to cultural anachronisms. Writings from recent years on historical topics often reflect our values, rather than those of the era being depicted. Stewardess (1982) by Robert Serling and Darryl Brock's time-traveller, baseball novel If I Never Get Back (1990) are self-consciously historical, involving apparently careful research into previous ages. In both cases, the authors express their liberal views on topics such as race relations and the roles of women. It all seems fairly comfortable to us now, and it is almost credible that some people from earlier ages would have shared our enlightened ways of looking at social issues (11). Still the net effect is one of "reading" the past through a modern set of glasses.

Metaphors about transportation are unusual in American literature. Even the famous "iron horse," developed at length in Walden (1854) is not mentioned often. From the start airplane parts, "wings" and "tails," were metaphorically linked to birds, while "rudder" was from ships. However, these terms are literal, in that they have no substitutes. Howard Nemerov describes "cruciform airplanes," but such metaphors are rare. We get little personification, bey.htmond the standard talk of vehicles in general as "she"; The Little Engine that Could, a children's story, gives personalities and genders to the several candidate engines who would deliver the toys to the kids.

More typical, but still not very frequent, are incidental similes and metaphors which use modes or individual features to interpret something else.

• "An omnibus, with its populous interior, dropping here and there a passenger, and picking up another, thus typifying that vast rolling vehicle, the world, the end of whose journey is everywhere and nowhere." (Hawthorne, 1851) A horse-carriage as an allegory of life.

• The "steel engine of the Devil's contrivance, a philanthropist." (Hawthorne, 1852). The locomotive and a personality type.

• "I think the longest Hour of all / Is when then Cars have come - / And we are waiting for the Coach - / It seems as though the Time / Indignant - that the Joy was come - / Did block the Gilded Hands - / And would not let the Seconds by - / But slowest instant - ends - " (Dickinson, Poem 635). Railroad schedules and life's progress; "cars" is shorthand for the railroad.

• A boss describes great wealth as "dollars enough to construct a silver railroad, double track, from this office to the moon." (Howells, Hazard, 1890). Hyperbole using railway construction.

• The bear's path "rushed through rather than across the tangle of trunks and branches as a locomotive would." (Faulkner, Go Down, 1942). A simile describing a notorious animal in the region.

• "They told me to take a street-car named Desire, and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at - Elysian Fields!" (T. Williams, 1947). Car lines and place names as an ironic allegory about the play's events.

• Roethke's "Journey to the Interior": "In the long journey out of the self, / There are many detours, washed-out interrupted raw places / Where the shale slides dangerously / And the back wheels hang almost over the edge." (1961) The image goes beyond metaphor to a detailed psychological allegory which continues in the whole poem.

• "One June, Richmond, Virginia, woke up with its brakes on and kept them on all summer. That was okay; it was the Eisenhower Years and nobody was going anywhere." (Robbins, 1976). Car performance is compared with political events.

• "Growing into old age toward death is like shifting gears in a car; now she's going into high gear, plowing out onto one of those interstates, racing into the future." (Mason, Spence, 1988). An automobile ride as an allegory of life.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the dramatic proliferation of the automobile and the highway took on metaphorical significance in several American literary works. As Herman, the main character in Harry Crews' 1972 novel Car, tells us, "Everything that's happened in this goddam country in the last fifty years…has happened in, on, around, with, or near a car." However, as Herman's tone reveals, the response to the automobile, to its pervasive influence, has consistently been ambivalent. Some writers glory in the wonders of high speed coupled with privacy to celebrate the freedom of the road; other see that the privacy can become a prison; others note how the apparent ability to use a car to escape can lead to just another psychological, social, or economic trap.

Of these broad themes in twentieth century American literature that are dependent on the automobile the first concerns the relation between time and experience and long-distance highway travel on the road, where the "road" is not synonymous with the automobile, but the idea takes on a particular meaning in car culture. In Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957), Dean Moriarity and Sal Paradise repeatedly talk about "it," an undefinable goal that seems to involve an unmediated, moment-by-moment self-knowledge that is detached from both past and future. Attaining "it," living in and "digging" the moment, is best attempted or is most possible driving cross country in big cars at high speeds. William Saroyan's Short Drive, Sweet Chariot (1966), though presenting a very different situation, articulates a similar (if less frenzied) idea. He's travelling with his cousin from Ontario to California in a 1941 Lincoln limousine. In their long, non-stop dialogue he says that he considers life must be fully exhilarating in the present moment. In the limo, enjoying movement itself, apart from thoughts of destination or the road behind, he finds a freedom that is miraculous and revelatory, providing, if only fleetingly, an access to "truth" unavailable at a more mundane pace. For both novelists the physical movement through space and the parallel with a movement of time - awareness of the link between driving and time - provide an opportunity for moment by moment experience, the leisure to pull even with the ever evasive moment, and to cruise alongside it and to experience it.

Robert Pirsig describes a similar connection between driving and time in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but he distinguishes between different types of roads: highways are about departures and destinations, past and future time, but smaller roads, because people live alongside them and are not so bent on getting somewhere else, provide a sense of "hereness and nowness" that rubs off on the driver. Further, Pirsig distinguishes between cars and motorcycles, claiming that on a motorcycle one is "in" the environment while cars function as a buffer between themselves and their drivers.

Other books are much less optimistic about the possibility of an ideal experience. The first is Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955), the story of Humbert Humbert's sexual exploitation of his stepdaughter, the prepubescent Lolita. Humbert takes Lolita out on the road where he can anonymously indulge himself with her in the motels and motor courts they stop at each day. Humbert's apparently erratic and directionless trip across the country, coupled with his concern that Lolita is growing older suggests that the drive is an effort to stop time by doubling back upon it. He wants to hold time still, evade the future, and preserve the present moment. Of course, he loses - his driving strategy doesn't work. And actually the car and driving betray him. On their last road trip together, Lolita navigates, and she takes them straight to Colorado - no zigzagging - where she meets up with Humbert's nemesis and escapes.

Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) is a cynical account of the road and the possibilities it offers. Initially the drive from Los Angeles to Las Vegas and the excitement of driving around the casino city seem to represent the freedom of the road and the joy of driving (a joy enhanced with generous doses of various drugs). But it turns out that the road swarms with cops and those with "cop hearts" who are all around, circling and watching, policing experience, waiting to strike anyone who steps outside the boundaries of lawful behavior. Further, the big cars of America here come to represent not freedom, but excess and exploitation. The freedom to drive, like other freedoms, is limited in its availability. Certainly the role of the cops and the dangers of the highway are evident in Kerouac's On the Road, but in that work there is still room to maneuver. Thompson's book depicts a darker and less open American highway, one on which unmediated experience is only a dream.

A second strand of automobility in American literature involves the tradition in which the road provides an escape from intolerable conditions - the road as a way out. In such literature a destination, a future, and not just movement, is crucial. But in these works, too, the promise often proves illusory.

The early, influential key work in terms of the literature of escape is John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1936). The novel opens when the Joads lose their farm in Oklahoma and the sale of their horses forces them to switch to a car culture. The car comes to replace the house and becomes the focal point for the family. As a moving hearth, the car is supposed to take them to a better life, out to golden California, where they can find work. But the promise of California proves false, as they're hounded from one town to another in their search for work. And ironically the car that was supposed to be the vehicle of salvation marks them as impoverished and so leaves them vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. The Joads' car journey is not an end in itself; it is a means to an end. Although they ultimately hope to get back to farming, their old life, they wind up on the road indefinitely, unable to get off.

A later version of this theme is Bruce Springsteen's song "Seeds," which tells the story of a family from the "rust belt" which, out of work, drives down to Texas. Finding no work, and reduced to sleeping in their car, they are pushed from one place to another by the police. The song ends, "Movin' on movin' on it's gone gone it's all gone." In both these works the road is an isolating force. The Joads are separated from their land and their community and forced to head out without social supports. In this situation the car functions as the last buffer between the family and absolute destitution. But their isolation makes it much tougher to reconnect with society, to reclaim a place in a community. The road in Lolita serves a similar alienating role, cutting the young girl from the protection which society could offer.

Another dimension of the connection between automobiles and psychological alienation involves the vehicle itself and its owner. Ownership, by definition, suggests mastery - and the ownership of a car has long been a symbol of prestige, particularly for males, and an important element of self-esteem. Considering this role, it's not surprising that the car can function as a stand-in for various deficiencies, again, especially for men. In Jayne Anne Phillips' Machine Dreams (1984), the father, despite having trouble supporting his family, always has a new car which he keeps in immaculate condition. The car (actually, the series of cars) is the one thing in his life that he can nurture and control. Cars (like other vehicles) have commonly been feminized and sexualized, as in e. e. cummings' 1926 poem "XIX," which metaphorically likens driving to sexual possession - the car is a virgin that must be "driven" carefully, broken in just right to insure a good ride.

This harmless, perhaps playful sexuality contrasts with Stephen King's Christine (1983), which tells the story of the relationship between an awkward young man and a '57 Plymouth Fury, the "Christine" of the title. He fixes the beat-up car, and as its appearance improves, he begins to bloom. His acne clears up, and he goes out with an attractive girl. But his obsession with the car begins to alienate him from others, first his parents, and eventually the girl. His anger drives him closer to Christine, even though she/it is depicted as malevolent - a real bitch who has some sort of supernatural agency. But she's the perfect woman,

• "She would never argue or complain.… She would never demand. You could enter her anytime and rest on her plush upholstery, rest in her warmth. She would never deny."

This conception of the "perfect woman" obviously puts a high value on passivity, and certainly the feminization of cars has much to do with the desire for total control of the female. Christine turns out to be a demanding lover who works to destroy first anyone who crosses her owner, and then all those close to him who express worry about his obsession. Once completely isolated, she/it kills him as well when he has the temerity to rebel.

Control and possession take a more unpalatable turn in Harry Crews's Car (1972), where the young man sets out to eat a '71 Maverick, half inch piece by half inch piece. His desire to swallow the car is told in sexual terms, and the car is clearly his love object. Ingestion has become his life's purpose, but it becomes a sexual act he literally can't stomach; after working his way through much of the front end, he is stopped by the pain. He ultimately shifts successfully to a human relationship.

A final, technical note about how stories are put together. Writers often use passing mention of a trip to move characters on and off the "stage." As speeds and distances increased, the characters can credibly get further, quicker:

• "Six months later he went to Hadleyburg, and arrived in a buggy at the house of the old cashier" (Mark Twain, "The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg," 1899)

• "He got his car and started north a little after dark. He spent the night in Albany and got to the town of Lake St. Francis in the middle of the morning." (Cheever, "Metamorphosis," 1978)

A fair number of narratives, especially short stories, begin with telling how the characters traveled to the site of the events. Several of Willa Cather's stories, for example, use a formula with the train's arriving at the start and leaving at the end.

• In "'A Death in the Desert'" (1903) Everett Hilgarde becomes aware of the man across the aisle on the "High Line Flyer" "jerking along through the hot afternoon over the monotonous country between Holdrege and Cheyenne." "The four uncomfortable passengers [in the car] were covered with a sediment of fine, yellow dust… [which] blew up in clouds from the bleak, lifeless country through which they passed."

• In "The Sculptor's Funeral" (1905) a "group of townspeople stood on the station siding of a little Kansas town, awaiting the coming of the night train, which was already twenty minutes overdue." After they speculate about when the train will arrive, "The night express shot, red as a rocket, from out the eastward marsh lands…"

Comments on the literary perspective

Most of this literature presents us with middle-class views of the world. While occasionally an independently wealthy person or a landed aristocrat writes stories or verse, this is rare. Alternatively, few American writers have come from poor or manual-laboring families. The expense, and especially the time to learn literary conventions, to read extensively, or to write and polish for publication are simply not available. In the nineteenth century some writers from modest backgrounds managed to find the time through indulgent parents or spouses to build literary careers sufficient for them to support their families. A larger group began their careers as printers or journalists. In the later twentieth century, support has become more readily available, through college scholarships for apprenticeships and creative writing programs for ongoing employment. While a few imaginative writers have become quite wealthy (Stephen King), they are the exception, and rarely does their wealth get them away from an essentially middle-class perspective on the world.

These generalizations about American writers obtain for most readers as well. Except for using free public and school libraries, readers need some spare money to buy books or magazines and, again, spare time to read them. We thus find that many famous and influential writers and writings appeared in Harper's and Atlantic from the middle of the nineteenth century and in the New Yorker, especially after World War II.

Except for the consciously political and economic analysis by Zane Grey, Charles and Frank Norris and Upton Sinclair, we get views of transportation essentially from the naive consumer's or passenger's perspective. These literary works show little sense of the railroads or automobiles as industries, as massive economic enterprises involving equipment manufacturing, a road-bed infrastructure with major public subsidies, and extensive safety and rate regulations. Literature rarely touches on the support staff - the gas station attendants, Pullman porters, or airplane stewardesses, although African-American writers pay continuing attention to road gangs and porters. These works show little awareness of costs beyond the price of a ticket - little sense of the environmental effects of road building, railroad track construction, or operating vehicles. That is, literary artists are rarely environmentalist prophets.

In principle and in practice, there's nothing to stop literary artists from approaching social issues in any detail they want. The turn of the century era shows that fine novels and poems could include economic analysis, reform politics, discussion of social consequences, and even a bit about the environment. That earlier writers, and especially that contemporary writers ignore these issues is a matter of literary taste, combined with the realities of literary "production," in the sense that an author must find a publisher in order to create or find an audience. For example, while Updike's Rabbit Redux (1971) commented extensively on middle-class life and customs, Black Power, and other issues, he chose not to deal extensively with the automobile industry beyond a few racist remarks about Japanese competition, even though one of the main characters works at a Toyota agency.

This is not to condemn literature as being willfully naive. Literature reflects the ongoing citizen's sense that what matters in transportation in its function - what it can do to move people and goods around - not for its form - what it is, physically and economically.

One might properly conclude from these observations that, if a person learned about the world only from imaginative literature, that person's view of the world would be limited. Fair enough. But the same could be said for learning exclusively through history, sociology, or environmental impact statements. On the other hand, we hope that, by adding a literary perspective to the study of transportation, you will conclude that it is (almost) essential to include that perspective in order to see the issues in their full complexity.

People who work in the field of transportation will draw personal, aesthetic, social, and political conclusions from reading imaginative literature about their topic. This is what any reader does. However, it is possible to tease out some practical advice from our survey which might help transportation professionals design and refine multimodal systems for the twenty-first century, and which might help public officials explain those systems to their constituencies.

Several themes appear often in our survey. With a topic like transportation, which is, for most literary works, part of the general backdrop, we can rely on the authors' perceptions as being fairly accurate, at least within the limits of their own experiences and those of their families and friends. For reasons outlined above, literature reflects ordinary citizens' views of transportation systems. So we can let the poet or novelists (or the narrator, or the characters) speak for "the people."

1. People don't care much about the technical details of transportation; they just use what they can; they seldom look "under the hood." In the horse-and-buggy age, they rarely even counted the horses.

2. They view transportation systems as givens - vehicles are patiently waiting, at the depot or in the garage. They care little about the development or expansion of existing networks. Highways or train tracks are "just there" for most writers, even though a few authors at the end of the last century depicted the expanding railway on the eastern horizon, ready to bring goods and people to the frontier.

3. People have almost no interest in the higher finances of transportation; they don't know or care where the investment capital comes from. They do care a lot about the price of an individual ticket for personal transportation, particularly when a character is poor. On the other hand, concerns about the purchase price or maintenance costs of automobiles dropped out of literary consciousness after the 1920s, to be replaced in a vague way with the simple naming of car brands.

4. A few literary works, chiefly popular novels, make a point that, for example, the poor have Chevys and the rich have Packards. A more frequent and more consequential social distinction has been between competing systems - the poor take trains while the rich own cars (or, earlier, carriages).

5. The airplane's virtual absence from literature until the past two decades shows that, no matter how technically or poetically inspiring a new system is, it doesn't matter until the middle-class can afford a ticket.

6. People pay much more attention to the movement of passengers than to the movement of goods. Freight trains and trucks are much less noticed than Pullmans and automobiles. The railroad and steamer are now perceived to be "dead," despite their continued, crucial role in carrying freight across the country and around the world.

7. Many authors celebrate the social interactions that take place in the vehicle or at a waiting room. Even in the light of delays and messed up schedules, a pleasant and chatty wait can mitigate the inconveniences.

8. People of color, especially African Americans, have a very different view of transportation from that held by the white middle class. Blacks could not help notice the effects of racism; slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation are still bitterly remembered.

9. The causes of most (literary) accidents are separated from human agency; they rarely arise from careless driving, or poor road or track conditions. Accidents are usually "off stage," although several works show their terrible and surprising effects on a family and a community. There's little smog. Most of the smoke from the railroads serves to add a picturesque touch to a landscape. Literary transportation functions pretty well.

10. The broad view of American transportation history which comes through from this survey could be quite instructive to people in other countries who are planning their national systems to serve the public. The introduction of new modes looks quite different now, where layers of options are available, than it did in the last century where one system appeared to have followed and to have replaced another. Also, the significant lag between the multiple systems which supported New York city at the turn of the century and the relatively slow diffusion to the rest of the country suggests interesting political and economic policy alternatives. Finally, the national planner should appreciate the importance of individuals' perceptions and limited perspectives on the success or failure of what is being proposed.

This research has been supported by generous grants from the University of Minnesota's Center for Transportation Studies. Bob Johns of the Center has been a strong supporter of the project. In addition, we appreciate the suggestions by an anonymous reviewer of an early draft, as well as detailed comments from Professor Edward Griffin of the University of Minnesota. As always, we, not they, are responsible for what has resulted.