ny times book review the lincoln highway

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With four kids in an old studebaker, amor towles takes readers on a real joyride.

Heller McAlpin

The Lincoln Highway is a joyride. Amor Towles ' new Great American Road Novel tails four boys — three 18-year-olds who met in a juvenile reformatory, plus a brainy 8-year-old — as they set out from Nebraska in June, 1954, in an old Studebaker in pursuit of a better future. If this book were set today, their constant detours and U-turns would send GPS into paroxysms of navigational recalculations. But hitch onto this delightful tour de force and you'll be pulled straight through to the end, helpless against the inventive exuberance of Towles' storytelling.

Like his first two novels, The Lincoln Highway is elegantly constructed and compulsively readable. Again, one of the ideas Towles explores is how evil can be offset by decency and kindness on any rung of the socio-economic ladder. His first novel, Rules of Civility (2011), set among social strivers in New York City in 1936, took its inspiration from F. Scott Fitzgerald and its title from George Washington's Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation . His much-loved second novel, A Gentleman in Moscow (2016), incorporated nods toward the great Russian writers and shades of Eloise at the Plaza and Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel . Mostly confined to a single setting — Moscow's luxurious Metropol Hotel — it spanned 32 years under Stalin's grim rule.

Towles' new novel ranges further geographically — from Nebraska's farmland to New York's Adirondacks by way of some of New York City's iconic sites — but its action-packed plot is compressed into just 10 days. The Lincoln Highway, which owes a debt to Huckleberry Finn, revisits American myths with a mix of warm-hearted humor and occasional outbursts of physical violence and malevolence that recall E.L. Doctorow's work, including Ragtime .

The novel begins on June 12, 1954 and ends on the same date, clearly not coincidentally, as A Gentleman in Moscow . When we meet him, Towles' latest hero, Emmett Watson, has been released a few months early from detention in consideration of his father's death, the foreclosure of the family farm, and his responsibility for his 8-year-old brother, Billy. (Billy has been ably taken care of by a neighbor's hard-working daughter, Sally, during Emmett's absence; she's another terrific character.) The kindly warden who drives Emmett home reminds him that what sent him to the Kansas reformatory was "the ugly side of chance," but now he's paid his debt to society and has his whole life ahead of him.

Shortly after the warden drives off, two fellow inmates turn up, stowaways from the warden's trunk — trouble-maker Duchess and his hapless but sweet protegé, Woolly. (In another fun connection for Towles nerds, naïve trust funder Wallace "Woolly" Wolcott Martin is the nephew of Wallace Wolcott from Rules of Civility. )

Eagerness to discover what landed these three disparate musketeers in custody is one of many things that keeps us turning pages. Expectations are repeatedly upended. One takeaway is that a single wrong turn can set you off course for years — though not necessarily irrevocably.

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The Lincoln Highway is, among other things, about the act of storytelling and mythmaking. The novel probes questions about how to structure a narrative and where to start; its chapters count down from Ten to One as they build to a knockout climax. Towles' intricately plotted tale is underpinned by young Billy's obsession with a big red alphabetical compendium of 26 heroes and adventurers — both mythical and real — from Achilles to Zorro, though the letter Y is left blank for You (the reader) to record your own intrepid quest.

Billy is determined to follow the Lincoln Highway west to San Francisco, where he hopes to find his mother, who abandoned her family when he was a baby and Emmett was 8. (The number 8 figures repeatedly, a reflection of the travelers' — and life's — roundabout, recursive route.) Whether riding boxcars or "borrowed" cars, Towles' characters are constantly diverted by one life-threatening adventure after another — offering Billy plenty of material for a rousing Chapter Y, once he figures out where to begin. One thing smart Billy comes to realize: He belongs to a long tradition of sidekicks who come to save the day.

"Most of us shell our days like peanuts. One in a thousand can look at the world with amazement," Towles wrote in his first novel. Of course, Towles is drawn to that one in a thousand. His interest is in those whose zeal has not yet been tamped down by what Duchess (the only first-person narrator) describes, with improbable flair for a poorly-educated 18-year-old, as "the thumb of reality on that spot in the soul from which youthful enthusiasm springs." With the exception of Woolly, the teenagers in this novel are remarkably mature by today's standards, and burdened by cares. But at any age, it's the young-at-heart who are most open to amazement — people like Woolly, who may not be cut out for this world but who can appreciate what he calls a "one-of-a-kind of day."

There's so much to enjoy in this generous novel packed with fantastic characters — male and female, black and white, rich and poor — and filled with digressions, magic tricks, sorry sagas, retributions, and the messy business of balancing accounts. "How easily we forget — we in the business of storytelling — that life was the point all along," Towles' oldest character comments as he heads off on an unexpected adventure. It's something Towles never forgets.

clock This article was published more than  2 years ago

Amor Towles’s ‘The Lincoln Highway’ is a long and winding road through the hopes and failures of mid-century America

On a humid afternoon in June 1954, my parents married in a whitewashed Methodist church in my mother’s hometown in rural south Georgia, rosette windows and palmettos framing the front doors. Vows exchanged, they climbed into a Chevrolet, hood ornament pointed toward a cottage on the Gulf of Mexico. A few black-and-white snapshots capture their honeymoon, edges scalloped, their faces bright and impossibly young. It’s all too easy to peer back at moments from that hopeful postwar era through a veil of nostalgia, even though the economic boom masked darker currents of inequity that would erupt a decade later.

It’s that sepia-tinted tension between aspiration and reality that fuels Amor Towles’s gorgeously crafted new novel. Set in that same month, “ The Lincoln Highway ” charts the cross-country adventures of four boys: Emmett Watson, an 18-year-old Nebraskan farm kid just released from a Kansas juvenile detention center after serving 15 months for involuntary manslaughter; his 8-year-old precocious brother, Billy; and two of Emmett’s fellow inmates, Duchess, a fast-talking swindler; and Woolly, the neurodivergent scion of an affluent Manhattan family — both recent escapees.

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Emmett’s mother, an East Coast transplant, fled the family after Billy’s birth, leaving a trail of postcards as a clue to her whereabouts. His father, deep in debt, has been snuffed out by cancer. Emmett decides to indulge Billy’s fantasy of finding their mother in San Francisco, retracing her trek west along the Lincoln Highway, the nation’s first transcontinental highway, which stretched from Times Square to California. The plan derails, though, when Duchess and Woolly show up unannounced. Emmett reluctantly agrees to give the pair a lift in his Studebaker — “it looked a little like a car that your dentist’s wife would drive to bingo” — but only as far as the bus station in Omaha.

From Jack Kerouac’s “ On the Road ” to William Least Heat-Moon’s “ Blue Highways ” to John Steinbeck’s “ Travels With Charley ,” automobile odysseys are a staple of American literature, but here Towles puts his own engaging stamp on the formula. (He also borrows elements from L. Frank Baum’s “ The Wonderful Wizard of Oz .”) High jinks ensue when Duchess and Woolly make off with the Studebaker, bound for New York, stranding the Watson brothers, who hop a New York-bound freight train in pursuit. En route, Emmett and Billy encounter a cast of technicolor characters: a gin-drunk aristocrat; a grifter evangelist who tries to steal Billy’s collection of silver dollars; and Ulysses, a Black World War II veteran who, like his Greek namesake, is nearing the end of a lengthy journey back to wife and son. They’re not in Nebraska anymore.

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“The Lincoln Highway” deftly shifts between first- and third-person narration. Duchess’s quirky bravado adds a kick, but also reveals an astute humanity; as he notes of his companion, “Raised in one of those doorman buildings on the Upper East Side, Woolly had a house in the country, a driver in the car, and a cook in the kitchen. His grandfather was friends with Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt. . . . There’s a tender sort of soul, who, in the face of such abundance, feels a sense of looming trepidation, like the whole pile of houses and cars and Roosevelts is going to come tumbling down on top of him.”

By contrast, Emmett’s sections, narrated in a close third, are as flat as the plains, largely because he’s something of a cipher, buffeted by twisters of his own making. And yet, Towles binds the novel with compassion and scrupulous detail: His America brims with outcasts scrambling over scraps from the Emerald City, con artists behind the curtain, the innocents they exploit. Towles revels in boxcars, flophouses and seedy bars, the junkyards of failed dreams. As Duchess opines, “When it comes to waiting, has-beens have plenty of practice. . . . Like for the bars to open, for the welfare check to arrive. Before too long, they were waiting to see what it would be like to sleep in a park, or to take the last two puffs from a discarded cigarette.”

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Balanced against this quiet despair is the evergreen spirit of American optimism. Ulysses dares to hope for a reconciliation with his lost family. Billy is convinced that he and Emmett will reunite with the mother who abandoned them. Sally, the Watsons’ neighbor, is a prairie proto-feminist, weary of farm chores, with her own ideas about how the world should work. Examining the dynamics of race, class and gender, Towles draws a line between the social maladies of then and now, connecting the yearnings of his characters with our own volatile era. He does it with stylish, sophisticated storytelling. There’s no need for fancy narrative tricks.

“The Lincoln Highway” is a long and winding road, but one Towles’s motley crew navigates with brains, heart and courage. The novel embraces the contradictions of our character with a skillful hand, guiding the reader forward with “a sensation of floating — like one who’s being carried down a wide river on a warm summer day.”

Hamilton Cain  is the author of “ This Boy’s Faith: Notes From a Southern Baptist Upbringing ” and Contributing Books Editor for O, the Oprah Quarterly, and Oprah Daily. He lives in Brooklyn.

The Lincoln Highway

By Amor Towles

Viking. 592 pp. $30

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The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles review – a love letter to the American road trip

This sweeping book is as much about the literary history of the road novel as it is about one engaging journey

I t would be easy to be riled by the idea of Amor Towles. An investment banker whose debut novel, The Rules of Civility , was released in 2011 to rave reviews and stupendous sales, Towles quit his well-paid day job and settled down to write an even bigger hit, 2016’s A Gentleman in Moscow , inspired by “his experience of staying at luxury hotels”. That novel sold by the bucketload – his first two books have now racked up more than 4m global sales, have been translated into 30 languages, and enable Towles to list his hobbies as “collecting fine art and antiquities”. Perhaps understandably, I picked up his third novel, The Lincoln Highway , with a hint of bad faith. That I enjoyed it despite myself is a tribute to Towles’s near-magical gift for storytelling, his ability to construct a cast of characters at once flawed, lovable and fascinating.

The novel opens in 1954 as the 18-year-old Emmett Watson is being driven through the midwestern emptiness by a prison warden. He has been released on compassionate grounds after serving a little over a year for hitting a boy who mocked his sickly father. His opponent had fallen against a kerb and died, and Emmett was shipped off to a juvenile reform programme on a farm in Kansas. Now he’s back, but with his father dead and the family farm seized by the bank, Emmett must work out how to take care of himself and his precocious younger brother Billy.

Duchess and Woolly – both young men, the former sharply charismatic, the latter a “tender sort of soul” addicted to unnamed “little pink pills” – saw Emmett’s departure from the reform programme as an opportunity. While the warden signed Emmett out, they slipped into the back of his truck and now reveal themselves to Emmett and his brother. Emmett has plans to go to California to attempt to track down his long-lost mother, heading off down the Lincoln Highway that passes close-by his Nebraska farm. The Lincoln Highway is America’s oldest coast-to-coast road: “It starts in Times Square in New York City and it ends three thousand three hundred and ninety miles away in Lincoln Park in San Francisco.” Rather than heading west, though, Emmett is persuaded by Duchess to go east, to upstate New York, where one of Woolly’s relatives was said to have buried a fortune in the woods.

In The Lincoln Highway , Towles gives us what all great road novels give us: the panoramic sweep of the prairies and hills, adventures that seem to spring from the landscape itself, the propulsive rhythm of the road. The novel is told through multiple perspectives and each is as engaging and fully realised as the next. It’s as if the restricted palette of the previous novel – A Gentleman in Moscow was the story of the fictional Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov and his incarceration at the Hotel Metropol in Moscow – has encouraged a rollicking expansiveness here, not only the wide American vistas, but also the narrative, which rambles off down tangents and leaps from one perspective to the next with energetic restlessness. It’s a novel that is as much about the literary history of the American road as it is about the journey itself, and deserves a place alongside Kerouac, Steinbeck and Wolfe as the very best of the genre.

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The Lincoln Highway

By Amor Towles Viking: 592 pages, $30 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

“Well, that’s life in a nutshell, ain’t it,” says Duchess, recently escaped from a boys’ detention center in Salina, Kan., and recently arrived at his friend Emmett’s Nebraska farm. “Lovin’ to go to one place and havin’ to go to another.”

Duchess, the felonious foil to law-abiding Emmett, does not open Amor Towles’ new novel, “ The Lincoln Highway ,” with those words. But they capture the essence of this old-fashioned, meandering tale of two orphaned brothers in the 1950s and their journey in search of a future.

Not much links this novel with Towles’ other work — “ Rules of Civility ” and “ A Gentleman in Moscow ,” two books that also have little in common except their historicity and their popularity. Here the author has chosen that most American of icons for his title and plot: a famous highway , dedicated in 1913, that not only spans the vast country from east to west but is named for the president who united its north and south. That’s a wide load of metaphor for any book to bear, even one nearly 600 pages long.

Still, like the infrastructure we once built and reliably maintained, “The Lincoln Highway” bears its weight easily — and Towles never pushes things too far. Honest Abe makes an appearance as a statue in a park, but readers must make some connections for themselves instead of having them thrust textually upon them.

Eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson, who spent nearly a year behind Salina’s hard walls before being released, wants more than anything to get home to Morgen, Neb., and his 8-year-old brother, Billy. He knows their mother has vanished, and he isn’t surprised to find their profligate father has died after running the farm into the ground. Only their neighbor Sally, who nurses more than a crush on Emmett, arrives to help, bearing a chicken casserole and a jar of her strawberry preserves and having already stocked the refrigerator with perishables.

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In the garage, Emmett finds what’s most important to him, after Billy: His 1948 Studebaker Land Cruiser. He has sensible plans to take Billy to Texas, where he can start buying modest houses and flipping them until he’s amassed enough real estate to set them up on firm financial ground.

Billy has other plans. He functions as the deus ex machina of the book; not only does he set events in motion, he also has an almost magical ability to pull just the right story out for the strangers he meets along the way — mainly from “Professor Abacus Abernathe’s Compendium of Heroes, Adventurers, and Other Intrepid Travelers” — a gift from the Morgen town librarian.

The book-within-the-novel is both a convenient source of nested tales and a thematic vector, indicating Towles’ commitment to wrestling with classic Americana — that braid of fact, fiction and derring-do so many of us recognize as a birthright, for better or worse. Billy’s own corn-fed idealism leavens the sometimes-bleak travails along our heroes’ journey.

Just as Billy convinces Emmett they should take the titular highway to San Francisco and find their absent mother, enter Duchess and his comrade Woolly, unannounced and unwanted. They stowed away in the trunk of the car that brought Emmett home.

You can almost guess what’s going to happen the minute Duchess sets his eyes on the Studebaker. After he and Woolly hit the road in that car, Emmett and Billy hit the rails to catch up with them in New York City. The alternating adventures of these pairs hit many different notes, from chaotic (boys in an orphanage bestowed an unsupervised treat) to frightening (a railway bum calling himself Pastor threatens to throw Billy from the train) to wondrous (Emmett’s first sight of Manhattan). Their travels follow the contours and rhythms, the on- and off-ramps of America’s highways, which send us off wherever we desire to go. Or, more accurately, wherever fortune dictates.

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That notion of American openness, of ever-fractalizing free will, coming up against the fickle realities of fate is the tension that powers Towles’ exciting, entertaining and sometimes implausible picaresque.

At one point, Emmett considers the tall tales in Billy’s beloved Abernathe compendium: “What good could possibly come from mixing the lives of these men with stories of mythical heroes setting sail on fabled waters to battle fantastical beasts? By tossing them together, it seemed to Emmett, Abernathe was encouraging a boy to believe that the great scientific discoverers were not exactly real and the heroes of legend not exactly imagined. That shoulder to shoulder they traveled through the realms of the known and unknown making the most of their intelligence and courage, yes, but also of sorcery and enchantment and the occasional intervention of the gods.”

The Lincoln Highway can take people east and west but not north and south, nor high nor deep. Journeying beyond that single axis requires the alchemy of Abernathe, the infusion of fiction, adventure, myth. In one of the best scenes in this lovely new novel, Billy meets a Black man named Ulysses whose World War II post-traumatic stress disorder has distanced him from both his family and himself. When Billy explains the origins of the name “ Ulysses ” to him, relying again on Professor Abernathe, the man is moved to tears. Stories can bring us back to ourselves, Towles seems to say, if only we are open to receiving their power.

But no story, no matter how powerful, can endow Towles’ Ulysses, a man of color in 1950s America, with the freedom that even the poorest white characters in “The Lincoln Highway” take for granted. Think of Colson Whitehead’s “ The Nickel Boys ,” in which a midcentury reform school is not the launching pad for adventures but a destroyer of lives.

Some stories take us to places we love and places we don’t — or to one destination when we would prefer to reach another. It’s our decision to keep reading, or not. Anyone who follows “The Lincoln Highway” will relish the trip, bearing in mind that there are roads not taken, whether by choice or for the absence of one.

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Patrick is a freelance critic who tweets @TheBookMaven .

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Review: 'the lincoln highway,' by amor towles.

Amor Towles' follow-up to his bestselling book "A Gentleman in Moscow" arrives on a wave of anticipation, at a time when we long for simpler days. Set in 1950s America, "The Lincoln Highway" is a road novel that celebrates the mythos of an era via a cross-country highway, and it delivers an overwhelming blast of nostalgia that many readers will welcome even if it doesn't add anything new to the genre.

Like the highway, the novel is long, and it winds through adventures in the style of an old-fashioned serial, with an abundance of last-second rescues and romantic philosophizing (about the moral caliber of men who can take a punch, codes of honor and the need to "balance the accounts" in life). The philosophizing does not always spring from the most trustworthy of sources. Still, "The Lincoln Highway" is a romantic novel, not in a passion-and-courtship sense but in its idealization of the era.

The story follows the fortunes of two brothers of a familiar type: strong, silent Emmett and innocent, optimistic Billy. Emmett, 18, has just returned home to Nebraska after serving a sentence at a juvenile work farm (he accidentally killed another boy in a fight). The boys' father is dead, and a neighbor has been caring for Billy.

With the family farm in foreclosure, all that's left for the brothers to do is follow in the footsteps of generations before them: Go West. In California, Emmett hopes to build houses, while Billy believes they will find the mother who abandoned them.

Two escapees from the work farm derail their plan: Woolly, heir of a wealthy New York family; and Duchess, the abandoned son of a traveling actor. Duchess' sociopathic tendencies will present most (though not all) of the novel's conflicts, his actions rerouting the brothers to that other testing ground for dreams: New York City.

A skeptic might be tempted to view this parade of Americana with a weary eye. Knowing what to make of such a nostalgic surge is hard; social media has sharpened and enhanced our cynicism. But Towles isn't an ironic writer; he's not mocking the American dream. He's reveling in it.

Maybe for the reader, as for Emmett and Billy, the journey is the point. The road is long, after all, and "The Lincoln Highway" ends with unfinished business. What's more American than a sequel?

Connie Ogle is a book critic in Florida.

The Lincoln Highway

By: Amor Towles.

Publisher: Viking, 592 pages, $30.

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Review: The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles

The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles is a big work of fiction about the complicated journey of adulthood.

Towles’ previous book A Gentleman in Moscow published in 2016—I loved that novel and thought it was such a warmhearted tale. It spent two years on the New York Times bestsellers list and wow, what a hard accomplishment to follow. As a result, The Lincoln Highway was met with much anticipation.

I’ve actually owned The Lincoln Highway for months but the size is daunting (588 pages). I was also unsure of the story—18-year-old men on a road trip throughout the U.S. Still, I’ve seen so much praise but also plenty of negative reviews too so I was quite curious to read the story for myself.

And whew, I have so many thoughts. I felt everything from intrigue to boredom at times to absolute shock. This story is not what I expected in the slightest, which made for both an enlightening reading experience but also a bit of a confusing one as well. I go back and forth about what I think overall so here’s my attempt to digest it for you.

If you’ve read the book and would like to talk all things spoilers —head over to my discussion about the ending here .

What’s the Story About

First, I do think calling this novel The Lincoln Highway is a bit misleading. I thought it was going to be a road trip/buddy story that took the reader on the actual Lincoln Highway where I assumed we would visit plenty of small towns on the journey, meet interesting and quirky people and get to the final destination in a big, grand finale kind of way.

That’s not what happens. It is a journey, but more about boys becoming men and trying to find their place in a post-world society in 1954. The Lincoln Highway does make an appearance but two of our main characters don’t even get to really travel on it. Catchy title but not exactly accurate to the story.

We meet eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson as he arrives home to Nebraska from a juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His father has passed away and his mother left the family and with the family farm recently foreclosed by the bank, Emmett decides that he needs to take his eight-year-old brother Billy to another state where they can begin a new life.

However, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden’s car who drove him home. In a turn of events, they all began a fateful journey to New York.

Multi-Perspectives

We read the story from the third-hand perspectives of Emmett; his brother Billy; Woolly, one of the friends who escaped the work farm and several other characters. But we read the first-person perspectives of Duchess, the other friend who escaped the work farm and Sally, one of Emmett’s friends from Nebraska. It’s interesting that the author Amor Towles decided to shift perceptive like that. I have a theory of why he did that but it’s a bit of a spoiler so I will save it for my let’s talk about the ending article.

It did help having so many characters lend their true perspectives, especially as actions are sometimes different from their thoughts. There’s also some unreliable narration going on as well.

Although, I will say, Emmett is clearly our protagonist where Duchess is something else… to be honest, I wasn’t a fan of Duchess the moment he arrived and I didn’t love reading his perspective. I did not find him charming or misunderstood but more of a nuisance and with him having such a big role, that is one reason I did not love this novel.

That said, I do think the novel could have been trimmed—almost 600 pages is quite long. And there were areas I felt completed dragged and I started to lose interest. I’m not sure why they thought the longer the better as I think a more tighter story would have been stronger.

Much of the novel features Amor Towles in his signature style—warmhearted, big and epic storytelling.

However, the last 60 or so pages really came out of left field for me. When I finished it, my husband asked how it was and I said, “I’m unsure.” Again, it’s a long novel but bizarrely, it almost changes in tone and genre, especially toward the end.

As I write this, it’s been 24 hours since I’ve finished it and I’ve thought about it quite often since then. The more I think about it, I see where there are hints of something a bit more sinister lurking from several of the characters. I do see where the author laid the ground work for what was to happen but I feel the sudden shift was still jarring.

So what are my thoughts overall? I think the book is beautifully-written—Amor Towles really can write a truly masterful novel. But I do feel that the story missed the mark in several areas and I felt it dragged too. I’m still unsure about the tone shift because while shocking, it did not give a satisfying ending. I think this needed either an epilogue or promise of a sequel.

So all in all, I did not love the novel but I didn’t actively dislike it either. Disappointed in some areas but I did enjoy other aspects.

But again, that ending will get people talking so this novel is ideal for book clubs in many ways. For book clubs, check out my discussion questions here . And if you want to talk about the ending specifically, visit my post here.

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Saturday 28th of May 2022

I agree. Enjoyed the beginning but became bored by the end. Far too long.

Booklover Book Reviews

The Lincoln Highway, Book Review: Amor Towles’ heroic dogma

The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles is filled with characters that charm but international readers may find the anthemic Americana less beguiling. Read my full review.

The Lincoln Highway Book Synopsis

Two brothers venture across 1950s America to New York in the absorbing new novel by the author of the bestselling  A Gentleman in Moscow.

In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter.

With his mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett plans to pick up his eight-year-old brother Billy and head to California to start a new life.

But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have stowed away in the trunk of the warden’s car. They have a very different plan for Emmett’s future, one that will take the four of them on a fateful journey in the opposite direction – to New York City.

Bursting with life, charm, richly imagined settings and unforgettable characters,  The Lincoln Highway  is an extraordinary journey through 1950s America from the pen of a master storyteller.

( Penguin Books Australia , 2021)

Genre: Literature, Historical, Drama, Adventure

Disclosure: If you click a link in this post we may earn a small commission to help offset our running costs.

Book Review

After raving over Amor Towles debut novel Rules of Civility , I was very much looking forward to reading his highly anticipated third novel The Lincoln Highway . It is featured in countless Best Books of 2021 lists, and the Amazon Book Review editors even named this their #1 book of the year .

Towles once again displays his skill and dare I say it, devotion to character development. There were multiple characters and descriptions that charmed me.

You’ve got to love that about Woolly. He’s always running about five minutes late, showing up on the wrong platform with the wrong luggage just as the conversation is pulling out of the station.

But, I think it is worth approaching this chunky 576 page novel with managed expectations – particularly so international readers who like me are less likely to be beguiled by this tale’s anthemic strains of Americana.

Now, I was always going to finish reading The Lincoln Highway because Towles hooks you early on setting off a domino-like series of events with menacing portent. But my expectation that this novel only spanning 10-days in the life of its characters would translate to a fast-paced reading experience was misguided.

Alternating perspectives

The Lincoln Highway narrative is told from alternating character perspectives – a literary construct I typically really enjoy. But I found Towles’ decision to use third-person perspective for some characters and first-person for others perplexing to say the least. I suspect it was something to do with ‘reading about heroes’ and a desire to heighten narrative suspense. But this, the numerous side tales and at times laboured moral messaging broke my reading spell on many occasions.

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

I would describe The Lincoln Highway ‘s conclusion as thought-provoking and worthy of interrogation, rather than satisfying. I am a big believer in karma, but this brand of casual fatalism and eye-for-an-eye dogma was just a little hard for me to swallow.

In The Lincoln Highway Amor Towles once again delivers characters that charm. That is his enviable talent. But, whether readers are ‘swept away’ by their story, I think rests heavily on personal experience and philosophical outlook.

BOOK RATING: The Story 3.5 / 5 ; The Writing 4 / 5 – Overall 3.75

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More The Lincoln Highway reviews

‘ The Lincoln Highway  is a joyride… delightful tour de force .. There’s so much to enjoy in this generous novel packed with fantastic characters’ – NPR.org

‘Towles’ third novel is even more entertaining than his much-acclaimed  A Gentleman in Moscow  (2016)… A remarkable blend of sweetness and doom, Towles’ novel is packed with revelations about the American myth, the art of storytelling, and the unrelenting pull of history. An exhilarating ride through Americana.’ – Kirkus Starred Review

‘With its down-home style and ideas about the lone hero, The Lincoln Highway is pure Americana. Reading it in any other country is like taking a vacation in the Land of the Free: a long, easy, enjoyable if at times hokey ride on a highway filled with adventure.’ – The Guardian

About the Author, Amor Towles

Amor Towles was born and raised in the Boston area. He graduated from Yale University and received an MA in English from Stanford University. An investment professional for over twenty years, he now devotes himself full time to writing. Towles lives in Manhattan with his wife and two children. Check out his website or connect with him on Twitter .

* My receipt of a review copy from the publisher did not impact the expression of my honest opinions above.

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A booklover with diverse reading interests, who has been reviewing books and sharing her views and opinions on this website and others since 2009.

The Lincoln Highway: Q and A

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For those who did not get to attend one of the events for THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY, you can watch my full speech here in which I discuss my novel, the history of the highway, and my writing process in some detail. If you prefer, you can watch me in conversation about the book with Ann Patchett , Erik Larson , Ken Burns , John Grisham or Richard Russo .

Below are my answers to some common questions.

When you finished A Gentleman in Moscow , why did you choose to write The Lincoln Highway next?

When I finish writing a novel, I find myself wanting to head in a new direction. That’s why after writing Rules of Civility —which describes a year in the life of a young woman about to climb New York’s socioeconomic ladder—I was eager to write A Gentleman in Moscow —which describes three decades in the life of a Russian aristocrat who’s just lost everything. The Lincoln Highway  allowed me to veer again in that the novel focuses on three eighteen-year-old boys on a journey in 1950s America that lasts only ten days.

The reason I make a shift like this is because it forces me to retool almost every element of my craft. By changing the setting, the era, and the cast of characters, I also must change the narrative’s perspective, tone, and poetics so that they will be true to these people in this situation at this moment in time. Similarly, by changing the duration of the tale—from a year to thirty years to ten days—the structure, pacing, and scope of thematic discovery all have to change.

Can you tell us something about the origin of the story?

I always start with a very simple idea, a conceit that has popped into my head and which can be described in a sentence. In the years that follow, I’ll keep returning to the idea, picturing the characters, the settings, the events, eventually filling a few notebooks while slowly gaining an understanding of the story as a whole. So, when I sit down to write the first chapter of a book, I’ve spent years imagining it already. (The adjacent photograph shows some of the notebooks I was working in including one from July 2014 with the book’s original working title Unfinished Business. )

 Generally, I can remember where I was when I had the initial notion for a book. With Rules of Civility I was at a friend’s house on Long Island in 1990 looking at a collection of the portraits that Walker Evans had taken with a hidden camera on the New York City subways in the late thirties. With A Gentleman in Moscow, I was walking into a hotel in Geneva in 2008. In the case of The Lincoln Highway, I have no idea where I was or what I was doing. I only remember being struck—more than a decade ago—by the notion of an honorable young man being driven home from a juvenile work program to the family farm only to discover that two of his fellow inmates have stowed away in the warden’s car.

Is the Lincoln Highway real?

It certainly is. You can find my brief history of the highway here .

Can you talk about the shifting points of view in the book?  

When I first outlined The Lincoln Highway, the plan was to describe the story from two alternating perspectives: Emmett’s (in the third person) and Duchess’s (in the first person). This seemed a natural way to juxtapose the two different personalities, upbringings, and moralities of the lead characters—and by extension, two different ways of being American.

But once I was writing, the voices of the others characters began to assert themselves, making their own claim on the narrative, insisting that their points of view be heard. First it was Sally and Woolly, then Pastor John and Ulysses, and finally Abacus and Billy. Now that the book is done, it’s hard for me to imagine it could ever have been told from the perspectives of just Emmett and Duchess.

So far, I haven’t used the omniscient narrator in my novels. Rather, I’ve either used the first person (as in Rules of Civility ) or a third person which is an extension of the protagonist’s point of view, tone and vocabulary (as in A Gentleman in Moscow ). In The Lincoln Highway , I use both of these techniques. The chapters of six characters are told in a third person that reflects their point of view and tone, while the chapters of Duchess and Sally are in first person. Duchess and Sally both presented themselves to me as first person narrators right from the start, and I trusted that. I suppose that’s because they have such strong and vocal personalities.

Can you talk about the structure of the book? 

As a novelist and a reader, I’m very interested in the role that structure plays in story-telling. Both Rules of Civility and A Gentleman in Moscow were conceived with very specific structures in mind (the former spanning from one New Year’s Eve to the next, and the latter spanning thirty-two years with an accordion-like shape). With The Lincoln Highway, from the first I imagined a story told over ten days.

When I began writing the book, it was laid out in sections titled Day One, Day Two, Day Three, and so on. But when I was about halfway through writing the first draft, I became frustrated. The book was feeling unwieldy, with sections that were cumbersome, slow, or off track. After dwelling for days on the draft’s shortcomings to no avail, I suddenly realized that the book wasn’t simply a story told over the course of ten days, it was a countdown. So, I went back to the beginning and began revising—having renamed the sections as Ten, Nine, Eight, and so on. This helped clarify for me what belonged in the story and how it should be told.

When I renamed the sections as a countdown, I assumed I would eventually restore the Day One, Day Two, Day Three titles. But when I finished the first draft, it seemed to me that the reader deserved to have the same experience while reading the book that I had while writing it: of knowing that the story was not open-ended, but ticking down day by day to its inescapable conclusion.

In some respects, The Lincoln Highway , seems to be a Bildungsroman in which the transition from youth to adulthood for the main characters is compressed from years into a matter of days. Can you comment on that?

When children are young, the nuclear family is a very tight unit (even when it’s dysfunctional). The relationships between husband and wife, between parents and children, and among siblings are omnipresent, governing habits and behaviors, influencing perspectives and emotions. But when children come of age in their late teens and early twenties, the household begins to unwind naturally, even purposefully. As young adults go off to college, enter careers, and get married, their focus shifts away from the household in which they were raised toward a world that they must shape for themselves.

The Lincoln Highway is certainly about this transition—in a concentrated fashion. Emmett, Duchess, Woolly and Sally are all in the process of moving on from the family structure in which they were raised to some unknown world of their own fashioning—with all the challenges and opportunities, all the insights and illusions that the transition implies.

Can you talk about some of the movies that are mentioned in the book?

Early in The Lincoln Highway , when Duchess observes Emmett allowing himself to be beaten up by Jake Snyder, he remarks that Emmett is like Alan Ladd in Shane , Frank Sinatra in From Here to Eternity , and Lee Marvin in The Wild One . When I was first drafting this scene, I came up with Duchess’s upside-down notion that sometimes the one being beaten up is the real “man”. These three films immediately popped into my head as good examples of the dynamic and I added them to Duchess’s reflections. But when I went back to review the passage, it occurred to me that I had no idea when these movies were made, and thus whether Duchess could even have seen them. As it turned out, they were all released in 1953—in April, August, and December, respectively—less than a year before the events in the story. So, not only could Duchess have seen them, together they provide us a revealing window into the America of 1954: a country still romanticizing the West, already mythologizing the Second World War, and beginning to grapple with a new generation of “wild” youth. The three movies also happen to be American classics and definitely worth a watch.

Another focus of the novel seems to be about the contrasting ethics of the characters…

The matter of ethics in the book is closely related to the youth-to-adulthood transition described above. When a young person sets out on their own, they will inevitably have to solidify some personal ethos by which they are going to live. I’m interested in the question of where this personal ethos comes from. To what degree does it spring from our community—from the shared traditions and mores that define our clan? Do our parents serve as an influence, or counter-influence in its formation? Does part of our ethos come to us in the form of stories, whether handed down or read in books? And to what degree do we fashion it on the fly based on our own instincts and experience?

Can you describe your process?

My process for writing The Lincoln Highway was very similar to my process for writing my other books. In each case, I designed the book over a period of years—ultimately generating an outline that details the settings, characters, and events chapter by chapter, from the opening pages right up to the final scene.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, one of the reasons I outline with such care is to free up my imagination while I’m writing the book. Because I have a detailed outline in place, when I’m starting a chapter I don’t have to wonder what the setting or key events are going to be. Instead, I can focus on the psychological nuances of the moment, the poetry of the language, and whatever surfaces from my subconscious. 

While I’m writing my first draft, I don’t share my work. But once I’ve completed the draft and cleaned it up, I give it to my wife, my editor in New York, my editor in London, and a few friends, asking that they all give me feedback within a few weeks. I then use their varied responses to reconsider the book’s strengths and weaknesses and begin the process of revising. Generally, I will revise the book from beginning to end at least twice before it reaches the reader.

Having said that you outline your books thoroughly, are there surprises that arise during the course of the writing?

While I’m writing chapters, I am constantly revising the back half of the outline or adding to it, as I gain a better understanding of my story. But I’m also adapting to surprises that surface from the work.

In the case of this novel, the single biggest surprise was the Lincoln Highway itself. When I conceived of the story, I had no idea that it existed. I stumbled across it as I was mapping out the route that the characters were going to take out of Nebraska. Once I learned the history of the highway—and that it extended from Times Square to San Francisco—I couldn’t believe my luck. Almost immediately, the Lincoln Highway reinforced or reshaped a number of the book’s themes and events.

Another fortuitous discovery relates to the photograph that’s in the book. While I avoid doing applied research before writing a novel, I do like to do some research once my first draft is complete to sharpen details or identify new threads for possible inclusion. To that end, when I was finished writing the first draft of The Lincoln Highway , I decided to look at the front pages of the New York Times for the ten days on which my story takes place: June 12 to June 21, 1954. As I was reviewing them, I was amazed by a story on June 14 th announcing that all activity in New York City would stop for ten minutes on the following day as part of a nuclear attack simulation. When I turned to the front page for June 15 th to see what had happened, there was a photograph of Times Square all but abandoned. That the photograph should be of the very spot where the Lincoln Highway begins seemed a coincidence too great to ignore, so I added the chapter of Woolly reading the old headlines.

Are there connections between The Lincoln Highway and your other books?

Despite the fact that I like to go in new directions whenever I write a new book, there are always connections between my books. In The Lincoln Highway the biggest connection, of course, is the character Wallace “Woolly” Martin, the nephew of Wallace Wolcott from Rules of Civility . 

Late in The Lincoln Highway Woolly gives Billy an old officer’s watch that has been handed down through his family from generation to generation. While doing so, Woolly explains that the watch’s dial is black and numbers white (in an inversion of the typical watch face), so that the dial would be less likely to attract the eye of snipers. Attentive readers of my work will recognize this watch as the very one that appears in Rules of Civility . In that novel, when Wallace is getting ready to leave New York for the Spanish Civil War in the summer of 1938, he and Katey gather together Christmas presents for his family to be delivered in December. The last gift that Wallace prepares is this officer’s watch, which he takes from his wrist and wraps for his young nephew and namesake. The Wolcott’s camp in the Adirondacks also figures prominently in Rules of Civility as the retreat where Katey goes to meet Tinker in seclusion.

Your premise could have been realized in many different decades. Why did you decide to set the story in 1954?

I find this moment in American history fascinating, but less for what was happening than for what was about to happen .

With the Korean War having concluded in July 1953, America was at peace in 1954; but the country’s entanglement in the Vietnam War was about to begin. Although America didn’t ramp up its full military presence in Vietnam until 1965, in November 1955, President Eisenhower deployed the Military Assistance Advisory Group. These were the American military personnel we sent to train South Vietnamese armed forces. It was the first step that would eventually lead to our full involvement in the war.

The battle for civil rights in America is as old as the Union itself, but in 1954, the modern civil rights movement was about to begin . On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, initiating the end of legal segregation and the concept of “separate but equal,” at least on paper. In the decade that followed would come Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her bus seat and the resulting Montgomery Bus Boycott led by Martin Luther King (1955), the lunch counter protests (1960), the Freedom Riders (1961), the March on Washington (1963), and countless other public actions culminating in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In 1954, the “sexual revolution” was about to begin .  It was in December 1953 that Hugh Heffner published the first issue of Playboy with an old nude of Marilyn Monroe serving as its centerfold—launching a new era of publicly acceptable pornography. That same year, the Kinsey Report on female sexuality was released, bringing private discussions of bedroom behavior into the public square. But the revolution would really take off when the Pill was approved in 1961, giving women and men the ability to engage in sexual activity with less concern over long term repercussions.

In 1954, television and rock & roll, two of the greatest cultural influences of the 20 th century, were about to take off. In 1950, there were only one million households in the US with a television set. By 1954, that had grown to 30 million and by 1959, 88% of US households would have at least one set. In those first ten years of television many of the lasting formats and idioms of the medium were defined from the evening news broadcast to the sitcom and from the soap opera to the late-night talk show.

1954 saw the release of the first two hits of the Rock & Roll era: “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” by Big Joe Turner and “Rock around the Clock” by Bill Hailey and the Comets. (“Rock Around the Clock” would have a particularly large impact when it was chosen to accompany the opening credits of the 1955 movie The Blackboard Jungle , a drama about an inner-city high school, starring the young Sidney Poitier.) To give some sense of the world at the time, the top thirty songs at the end of 1953 according to Billboard included the likes of Nat King Cole, Patti Page, Eddie Fisher, Tony Bennett and three songs by Perry Como. Which is to say that pop music before 1954 was a crooners’ game. Fifteen years later, the Billboard charts would be dominated by the likes of the Beatles, the Doors, the Rolling Stones, Steppenwolf, and Sly & the Family Stone.

While Rock & Roll is often referenced as a complement to the rise in youth culture in America, I would argue that it was a fundamental cause of the modern youth movement. At no point in prior history did teenagers anywhere in the world have an effective means by which they could share their perspectives with each other. Rock & Roll was an art form created and performed by young people for young people with their own experiences, hopes, and complaints as its principle subject matter. Rock & Roll was the first public forum in which the young could assemble, express themselves, and rally each other in support of their own priorities. But as I say, all of this was about to happen.

Finally, in 1954 the road culture of modern American was about to begin. In 1954, America had 6% of the world’s population and 60% of its cars, but the automobile was primarily used as a local convenience. When the Lincoln Highway was conceived by Carl Fisher in 1912, 90% of all roads in America were unpaved. In the 1920s, the federal government began investing in highways and established the first numbered routes, but long-distance roads remained fairly rudimentary for decades. It wasn’t until June 1956 with the passage of the Federal Aid Highway Act that that the country began building the Interstate Highway System—the multilane, highspeed highways that crisscrossed the nation, supporting not only the transportation of goods, but of workers, vacationers, and the curious. In the decade that followed, Americans would make great use of the new roads. While in 1950, 450 million vehicle miles were travelled in the US, by 1965, that number had doubled. In 1954, Holiday Inn had only three locations, but it would have 500 ten years later, and 1000 by 1968. 1954 was the year that both McDonalds and Burger King were launched.

So, while the great cultural shifts that defined America from 1955 to 1970 were not yet dominating the headlines in 1954, they were simmering just below the surface.

Is Fettucine Mio Amore a real dish?

One of my best friends growing up was an Italian-American named Claudio, who lived in Milan. When we were boys in the 1970s and Claudio would come to New England for the summer, he would be horrified by the American insistence upon drowning all pasta in a thick red sauce. A household should serve pasta in twenty different ways, he would argue, and each preparation should highlight a few essential flavors through intensity rather than volume.

Fettucine Mio Amore, the dish that Duchess makes for Emmett, Woolly, Billy, and Sally on their last night together, is an homage to my old friend and a favorite of the Towles family. Here’s the recipe:

• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 1 large or two small onions, halved and thinly sliced
• 1 pound of smoked American bacon, cut crosswise into ¼ inch strips
• 3/4 cup dry white wine
• 1 teaspoon oregano
• 1 teaspoon red pepper flakes
• 3/4 cup crushed tomatoes or tomato sauce (and not an ounce more!)
• ½ cup chicken broth
• ½ cup parmesan
• Fettuccine for four, preferably fresh, cooked until al dente

In a reasonably deep saucepan, cook the onions in the olive oil until soft and translucent, then set the onions aside. In the same pan, fry the bacon with the bay leaf until the bacon is brown but not crisp.  Pour off most, but not all of the bacon fat. Add back the onions, the white wine, and let simmer for a few minutes. Add the tomato sauce, chicken broth, oregano and pepper flakes, stir and let simmer another ten minutes. (Add a little more chicken broth as necessary, if the sauce is drying out.) Toss about 1/4 of the sauce with the cooked fettuccine and parmesan, divide the pasta on the plates, then spoon the rest of the sauce on top of the pasta. Serves four.

What are you working on now?

Something different.

ANSWERS TO FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Why are the Duchess and Sally chapters written in first person, while the chapters of the other characters are written in third person?

For an answer to this question, please see the question in the Q&A above that discusses the book’s shifting points of view.

Why is the dialogue in the book indicated by em dashes rather than quotation marks?

In my first novel, Rules of Civility, I also used em dashes instead of quotation marks.

Quotation marks are designed to let an author insert little parenthetical observations or characterizations in the middle of dialogue:

“I knew your father well,” he said soberly, “back in the early days of the war…”

“Yes,” she said smoothing her skirt, “another cup of tea would be lovely…”
 


By eliminating the quotation marks in Rules , I was forced to abandon these little clarifications and write conversation in such a way that the dialogue would do most of the work on its own. I also think it resulted in exchanges with a sharper delivery and quicker pace.

It seemed natural to use them again in The Lincoln Highway for the same reasons.

On page 456, when Woolly winds his watch sixteen times for six days in a row “on porpoise”, is that a typo?

There are multiple words and phrases throughout the book which Woolly alters, such as “absotively” or “in the muddle” or “an undersight”. He uses the word “porpoise” in place of “purpose” twice in the book. The first time occurs on p.192 while he is recalling his Gettysburg address recitation: “For all intents and porpoises (as Woolly used to say) there are twelve sentences, not ten…”  So no, this is not a typo. It is very much on porpoise.

Why is “Dennis” in quotation marks?

The quotation marks around Dennis’s name are also something of a Woollyism. I imagine that when Dennis first introduced himself to Woolly, he did so in a somewhat pompous fashion, and Woolly has called him “Dennis” ever since, imitating the pompous tone.

Regarding the ending… (SPOILER ALERT)

A number of readers have reached out with questions about Emmett’s intentions and culpability at the end of the book. Readers, of course, are welcome to draw their own conclusions. But here’s my take, for those who want it:

As Billy is cleaning the library, Emmett has placed Duchess in the boat and set him adrift in order to buy himself some time. Noting the hole in the bow of the boat, Emmett has piled stones in the stern in order to keep the hole in the bow above the water line. As Duchess himself notes (when he comes to), all he need do is lean back and paddle slowly, in order to make it safely to shore. But when the five o’clock wind starts blowing (which Emmett could not have anticipated), Duchess can’t help himself and moves towards the bow with fateful repercussions. I suppose it’s worth noting that Duchess isn’t angry with Emmett in the last chapter because he recognizes the ingenuity of what Emmett has done, and he knows his own culpability in the final outcome.

Some have wondered how Emmett will be able to live with the knowledge that Duchess has drowned; but Emmett is not likely to ever find out. For no one has any reason to suspect that Billy and Emmett were in the Adirondacks in the first place, and Duchess’s end will be viewed as an accident.

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The Lincoln Highway (Review, Synopsis & Summary)

By amor towles.

Book review and synopsis for The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles, a story about four young men journeying from Nebraska to New York City set in 1950's America.

In The Lincoln Highway , eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska in June 1954 by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter.

His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett's intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California where they can start their lives anew.

But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden's car. Together, they have hatched an altogether different plan for Emmett's future, one that will take them all on a fateful journey in the opposite direction—to the City of New York.

Spanning just ten days and told from multiple points of view, Towles's third novel will satisfy fans of his multi-layered literary styling while providing them an array of new and richly imagined settings, characters, and themes.

(The Full Plot Summary is also available, below)

Full Plot Summary

The two-paragraph version: Emmett (18) has just gotten out of juvie and is now planning to drive down the Lincoln Highway to move to San Francisco with his younger brother Billy (8). Billy hopes to find their mother (who left them 8 years ago) there. However, two guys (Duchess and Woolly) have snuck out from juvie and have followed Emmett home, hoping to convince him to help with a caper in New York to take back Woolly's $150K trust fund (which Woolly has been deemed "unfit" to access). When Emmett declines, Duchess "borrows" Emmett's car, forcing Emmet and Billy to stowaway on a train to New York to find Duchess and Woolly and reclaim it. They are aided by Sally, a family friend, and Ulysses, a black man they meet on the train.

Meanwhile, Duchess is also trying to settle some debts against along the way, and he attacks their former warden and other people. When they finally all reach Woolly's grandfather's lakeside house (where the safe with the money is), it turns out Woolly doesn't even know the combination to the safe. Woolly kills himself (which Emmett thinks was his plan all along since he was unhappy and misunderstood by his family), and Emmett and Duchess have a confrontation that turns violent. Ultimately, Billy is able to guess the safe combination, and Emmett puts Duchess (who can't swim) in a leaky boat on the lake with his share of the money. The book ends with Billy, Emmett and Sally heading off to San Francisco, while Duchess drowns trying to save his money from flying away (rather than floating back to safety).

(The book chapters count down from 10 to 1.)

Chapters 10 and 9 open with Emmett Watson (18) returning home to Morgen, Nebraska (dropped off by Warden Williams ) after having spent a year in juvenile detention for killing Jimmy Snyder . Jimmy was a troublemaker who had goaded Emmett into punching him. It caused Jimmy to fall and hit his head on a cinder block, resulting in his death.

In present day, Emmett learns his father's farm is being foreclosed upon by the bank. When Emmett tells his younger brother, Billy (8), that they will need to move, Billy suggests they move to San Francisco. Billy has recently found some old postcards indicating their mother (who left them 8 years ago) once took the journey there down the Lincoln Highway. Billy hopes she might still be living there now. While Emmett thinks his brother's plan of tracking down their mother in California is crazy, he knows that California (due to its high population growth) is a good place for him to pursue his goal of achieving financial stability by renovating and selling houses. After some research, he agrees to the plan.

They're soon interrupted by the presence of Duchess and Woolly , two guys Emmett knows from juvie. Duchess spent a few years in an orphanage, being raised by nuns, after his father abandoned him there for two years when he was 8. Meanwhile, Woolly is a troubled rich kid.

They explain that they stowed away in Warden Williams's trunk and have a proposition for Emmett. Woolly is the beneficiary of a trust fund that should have come under his control now that he's 18. However, his brother-in-law Dennis had him declared "unfit". There's also a wall safe at his great-grandfather's house in upstate New York that contains roughly the same amount of money as his trust fund, $150,000. They want Emmett to go with them to help Woolly get the cash, and in exchange they'll split the money evenly among the three of them. Emmett immediately declines.

The next morning, Sally Ransom , their neighbor and a former romantic interest of Emmett's drops by. She's upset to learn from Duchess that Emmett plans on leaving. In town, Jake Snyder (brother of Jimmy Snyder) accosts Emmett, trying to goad him into a fight and then punching Emmett a few times, though Emmett doesn't fight back.

In Chapters 8 and 7 , they hit the road with the plan of dropping Woolly and Duchess off at the bus stop in Omaha before Emmett and Billy continue on to San Francisco. However, Duchess derails the plan. He asks them to make a pit stop at the orphanage he stayed in for a few years as a child (because his father abandoned him there temporarily). There, he causes a commotion and then drives off with Woolly in Emmett's car (and inadvertently with all of Emmett's money), headed to New York. He promises to be back soon and to give Emmett his share of the cash when they return.

With no money and no mode of transportation, Emmett and Billy hitch a ride on a train to go to New York to track down Duchess and Woolly. On the train, Billy nearly gets his silver coin collection stolen from him by a fake pastor, "Pastor" John , but Pastor John is stopped by Ulysses -- a black WWII vet who is also hitching a ride on the train. Ulysses is a seasoned boxcar traveler, who has been iterant ever since he returned from the war to learn that his wife left him.

Billy gets to know Ulysses, and he tells Ulysses the legend of the Greek hero Ulysses. Billy has been reading an abridged version of from a big red book authored by someone named Professor Abacus Abernathe . The book features a number of great travelers and adventurers, both real and fictional.

Meanwhile, Duchess and Woolly have driven as far as Illinois by now. Duchess plans to start a new life after all of this and wants to clear out any debts he owes or owed to him before he does. They make a quick stop at the house of the retired former warden, Ackerly , who used to beat them. Duchess hits him on the head with a cast-iron skillet and leaves, noting that Ackerly's debt to him has been paid.

In Chapters 6 and 5 , they all make their way to New York. Duchess's goes looking for his father ( Harry ), who is trying to evade him after learning that Duchess escaped from juvie. Duchess finds Fitzy FitzWilliams , an old friend of Harry. We learn that when Duchess was 16, he framed by Harry for a number of thefts in the hotel they were living in (which Harry had actually committed). Fitzy lied in a statement to corroborate Harry's lie. In present day, Duchess guilts Fitzy into giving him Harry's current address in Syracuse.

Afterwards, Duchess goes to visit Townhouse, who was released from Salina a while ago. He wants to settle accounts with him, since Duchess owes Townhouse for having gotten Townhouse in trouble once. The two get squared away, and before Duchess leaves, he impulsively gives Townhouse's cousin Maurice the keys to Emmett's Studebaker (he thinks of it as a good deed that he's doing).

Elsewhere, Ulysses takes Billy and Emmett to a vagrant camp where they can stay for the night. Emmett goes into the city to track down Duchess, who knows is looking for his father. He gets Harry's former address from his agency. It leads him to Fitzy, who tells him about Duchess's past and also gives him Harry's Syracuse address.

Meanwhile, Woolly visits his sister Sarah who says that she has talked to Warden Williams, who is offering Woolly minimal consequences if he returns to juvie immediately. And back at that camp, Ulysses and Billy are attacked by Pastor John. However, Ulysses kills him and drops his body into the river.

In Chapters 4 and 3 , Emmett goes to visit Townhouse, who warns that the police recently came by looking for Duchess. He thinks it's about something more serious than Duchess's escape from Salina. He also returns Emmett's Studebaker to him, and his friends offer to repaint it since the police seem to have associated as blue Studebaker with whatever crime Duchess committed. Townhouse then directs Emmett to where Duchess will be that night, which turns out to be a raunchy circus show attached to a brothel. Emmett confronts Duchess and tries to get him to leave. However, Duchess drugs Emmett, leaves him at the brothel and ducks out.

Before heading to Sarah's place, the group passes by the location described in Billy's big red book as the offices of Professor Abacus Abernathe. They go to visit him and see that he's a real person. Billy tells Abacus about his own adventures. Abacus asks to meet Ulysses, and the two become acquainted.

Back at Sarah's place, Emmett eventually shows up. However, because he wasn't able to check in with Sally as he'd promised earlier, Sally ends up heading to New York (after attempting to call them) to check on Emmett and Billy. She arrives soon after Emmett. They all have a delightful dinner, but soon Dennis and Sarah come home. Dennis is furious to learn that Woolly is not at Salina. He demands that Woolly go work for one of his stockbroker friends after he finishes his sentence.

In Chapter 2 , Woolly and Duchess sneak out early and make their way to Woolly's great-grandfather's house in the Adirondacks in order to take the $150K from the safe. However, when they arrive, it turns out Woolly doesn't know the combination (and it never occurred to him there would be one). Then, as Duchess tries to hack open the safe, Woolly takes a bunch of pills and kills himself.

Elsewhere, Abacus thinks about how Billy has reawakened his desire for adventure. He decides to go with Ulysses to travel via boxcar and seek out his own adventure.

In Chapter 1 , Emmett arrives at Woolly's great-grandfather's house to find Woolly dead and Duchess still trying to get the safe open. Emmett and Duchess scuffle, and Emmett knocks Duchess out. (He doesn't kill Duchess because he had made a promise to Billy not to lash out again.) Meanwhile, Billy guesses the safe combination based on something Woolly had said about his great-grandfather loving the 4th of July. They also find Woolly's will, splitting up his $150K trust fund equally between Billy, Emmett and Duchess.

The book ends with Emmett leaving Duchess in a leaky boat with no oars and with his $50K share in cash. As Duchess tries to get to the money before it flies away, he drowns. Meanwhile, Emmett and Billy head for San Francisco. Sally joins them (platonically) so she can start a new life out there as well.

For more detail, see the full Chapter-by-Chapter Summary .

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Book Review

The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles is a book I’ve really been looking forward to ever since it was announced. Like many people, I really enjoyed his previous novel A Gentleman in Moscow , and I’ve been eager to revisit his writing.

Blue 1948 Studebaker Land Cruiser

The Lincoln Highway is an adventure story through and through. It tells the story of two brothers with a plan to travel down the Lincoln Highway from Nebraska to San Francisco, though their plans quickly get derailed from the onset.

I loved the tone and the atmosphere of this novel. The sense of adventure and knowing that the book has exciting times and surprises in store for you made it easy for me to look forward to what was coming next.

I also appreciated the journey that Towles takes each character on. He slowly reveals their character and backstory in a way that’s surprising and engaging. In general, I appreciated the parts of the characters that were complex and imperfect.

Beyond that, every section of this book feels crafted for a particular purpose, to bring the story forward in a particular way, though you may not realize it at the time. Like in A Gentleman in Moscow , Towles sets up specific plot points early on throughout the story, knowing he plans on revisiting them in a way that feels gratifying when you reach the later parts of the book.

Some Criticisms

That said, I didn’t fall in love with this book the way I was hoping to. In terms of the main character, Emmett felt a little vanilla at times to me, like a very generic leading man. He was easily the most predictable of the characters, which make him the least interesting to me. Meanwhile, while they were certainly less predictable, both Duchess and Woolly were a little much , in that they were too devious or too ridiculous at times. Something about them just felt a little cartoonish to me.

Meanwhile, Billy is the stereotypical precocious and overly-curious kid that movies and books love to cast in their stories. Moreover, the whole idea that Emmett would ever take Billy on this incredibly dangerous trip when there is a perfectly safe and caring place he could stay requires a lot of suspension of disbelief. It made it a lot harder to take this book seriously.

It’s a book that seems to want to feel grand and epic in scope — four adventurers traveling across the United States! — but doesn’t quite get there. The frequent references to things like Shakespeare, Odysseus, and other legendary characters only underscored for me how much smaller and less emotionally-impactful this story feels.

There are definitely moments where this book shines and it seems to capture precisely the fun, adventurous, freewheeling feeling it seems to be going for — but there’s some unevenness to it. Mixed in there are equal stretches of text when the story drags a little and feels a little mundane.

Read it or Skip it?

If you’re someone who loves a good adventure or a journey à la The Adventures of Tom Sawyer or something of that vein, The Lincoln Highway will probably be right up your ally. For the most part, it really captures that excitement of not knowing who they’ll come across next or what hijinks the various characters will get up to.

However, as I said before, I liked it, but I didn’t love it. While there was a fun sense of adventure, the story didn’t feel as epic as it seemed to be trying to be, and it didn’t seem to have a strong emotional pull to make me fall in love with it. It’s a long book that’s worth the time and effort, but it also often feels long as you’re reading it, if you know what I mean.

I think most book clubs could enjoy this though. Like I said, there’s plenty of discovery, adventure and fun hijinks in store if you decide to read it!

The Lincoln Highway Audiobook Review

Narrated by : Edoardo Ballerini, Marin Ireland & Dion Graham Length : 16 hours 38 minutes

I found the audiobook for The Lincoln High to perfectly serviceable and easy to listen to. The narrators all speak in a crisp, soothing well-paced manner.

There wasn’t anything about it that particular stood out to me, but if you’re interested in this story anyway, this audiobook is a great option.

Hear a sample of The Lincoln Highway audiobook on Libro.fm.

Discussion Questions

• How would you describe Emmett and Billy’s personalities? Why do you they are similar or different?
• What do you think about Emmett’s attitude toward Sally? What do you think of her expectations of him and what he seems to think her expectations are?
• What did you think of Emmett’s relationships with his father and mother? Do you think they were good parents to Emmett and do you think they were good people?
• What did you think of the side characters like Ulysses, Sally, Sarah or Professor Abernathe? Whose story interested you the most and why?
• Emmett is conscientious about wanting to protect his brother from questionable activities and less savory elements of life, but Billy seems to romanticize these things. What do you think about the decisions he makes?
• What did you think of the character of Billy? Did you find him believable as a character? Do you think you were similar to him as a kid?
• Why do you think the characters in the book are so concerned with settling debts and dealing with their obligations?
• What did you think of the character of Woolly? Do you think things could have turned out differently for him? What do you think would have needed to happen for his life to turn out differently? Why do you think Woolly is so fixated on avoiding a every-day-kind-of-day? Why do you think Woolly does what he does at the end of the book?
• Do you think Duchess is a good or bad person at heart? Do you think he could have been redeemed? Why do you think his story ended the way it did?
• Why do you think Sally decides to go to San Francisco? What do you think will happen to her father
• What do you think happens after the characters end up in San Francisco? Were you happy with the way the story ended?

Book Excerpt

Read the first pages of The Lincoln Highway

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In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett's intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California where they can start their lives anew.

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Lincoln Highway had literary touches similar to A Gentleman in Moscow especially when it diverged to secondary characters. In describing Lincoln Highway to others, it is a modern day Huckleberry Finn/The Wizard of Oz adventure….not on the Mississippi but instead, on America’s oldest highway. While the characters are rendered flawed and at the same time lovable…even Duchess who caused so much havoc along the way. It is Woolly and Billy, each on the opposite end of the intellectual spectrum, who are endowed with a unique sense of insight and prove true goodness. Now, Duchess’ ultimate undoing really bothered me in that, while well deserved, nonetheless proved Emmett really hadn’t “learned his lesson.”

9. My optimistic view on the ending: consider that this is Billy’s book, and everything in it was either witnessed by him or told to him by someone else, or made up. He could not know that Duchess drowned, because he and Emmett drove away in the car. If they were still there, they would have rescued him. So either they were not there, or they did rescue him after he went in the water.

If Billy was not there, then he made up the last bit to 1) fit his hero/morality story agenda about how heroes and anti-heroes die from their one weakness (here greed); and 2) to protect Duchess (and themselves) from the police by telling a made-up story about Duchess’s death, when really he got away with the money, as did Billy and his brother.

After reading Gentle in Moscow, I thought, so what. The story left me cold. I am one third through Lincoln Highway and find myself skipping through the wordiness to get to some point. Don’t think I will persist as I have other books calling me. The book needs a serious edit, taking out all the verbs to be to begin with. One wonders how this writer sells so many books as I don’t think he is a good writer.

My adult daughter and I absolutely loved this book! We finished it in 3 days because we could not put it down. We loved how it was written and cannot wait to read another of his books.

I agree with you about the book. Besides what you wrote, I was also dissatisfied with the ending. I didn’t really understand why Woolly committed suicide. And I didn’t really understand why Emmett set Duchess afloat like that. It seemed too mean for Emmett’s character. Also, Duchess could have just been patient and waited until the wind died on the lake. His emotion and desire for the money overcame his good sense. That was clear; but the Duchess I had come to know in the earlier chapters would have had more sense. Could you comment, please?

In my opinion Wolly committed suicide because he felt he had no other choice. There was clearly something wrong with him mentally and with the book set in the 1950’s there was not much available to him. He didn’t want to keep “fighting” for his life to get better he wanted to go back and revisit the place he was the happiest. Plus the only person in his life that seemed to care was Sarah. It was sad, but I understand that feeling of hopelessness!

I enjoyed the novel but there is one plot device which I found completely implausible. When Emmett realizes Duchess has stolen his car it does not occur to him to call the police and even more unbelievable is that he thinks he and Billy can take a freight train to NY city and there find Duchess and his car. Did he think he and Billy would just stroll around the sidewalks of NY and just by a stroke of luck find Duchess who would then be happy to return the stolen car and the money hidden in it? He is depicted as a smart level headed person so it is hard to believe he could be that naive.

Emmett did not put Duchess in the boat with a hole in it and a promise to Billy not to hurt Duchess any more than he had, so Emmett puts Duchess in the caddie. So who put Duchess in the boat. Well it certainly wasn’t Billy, so that leaves only one person left

Two mistakes/typos in Chapter 1 of this summary.

It is Duchess (NOT Woolly) who is still trying to get the safe open when Emmett arrives at Woolly’s great-grandfather’s house.

The book ends with Emmett leaving Duchess in a leaky boat with no oars (NOT no oaks).

Are the copy editors leaving all their work up to spell-check?

Barb, I didn’t catch those mistakes but a couple things bugged me. The fire that Wooly set at his private school might have burned down the goalpost but it would have been the old style goalpost shaped like an ‘H’, not the kind used today with one post in the ground. When talking about Sally’s truck it’s mentioned that she put something in the back seat but farm trucks in the early fifties didn’t have ‘crewcabs’. Also found it funny that the sheriff, when taking Emmet home, asks if he can smoke in the Studebaker. I think that at that time it was assumed one could smoke anywhere.

Don’t know why I see things like this as it doesn’t really matter but, hey, why not mention it.

Woolly, was my favorite character. Rules of Civility his first book gives reference to Woolly.

I didn’t like the way the book ended at all. Did Duchess really deserve this? I also wasn’t fond of how the author switches back and forth. He leaves one chapter as a cliff hanger and then proceeds onto the next character. I read it because I was determined to finish what I started but would not read it again.

– Entertainment Analysis and Reviews

Exploring the Legacy of the Lincoln Highway: A Captivating Book Review

The Lincoln Highway holds a significant place in American history as one of the country’s earliest transcontinental highways. Stretching from Times Square in New York City to Lincoln Park in San Francisco, this iconic roadway played a crucial role in connecting the East Coast to the West Coast during the early 20th century. Its construction, which began in 1913, revolutionized cross-country travel and became a symbol of American ambition and progress.

In this article, we delve into a book review of a fascinating publication centered around the Lincoln Highway. This book not only explores the historical significance of the highway but also delves into the stories, anecdotes, and transformative events that unfolded along its path. Through this review, we aim to provide readers with an insightful analysis of the book’s content, evaluate its strengths and weaknesses, and shed light on its overall contribution to the understanding of the Lincoln Highway.

As we embark on this review, it is important to recognize the enduring relevance of the Lincoln Highway. Beyond its historical context, the highway represents a powerful symbol of unity, discovery, and the adventurous spirit that has defined America. Through the lens of this book, we have the opportunity to delve into the captivating narratives that have shaped the Lincoln Highway’s legacy and its impact on the nation as a whole.

Summary of the Book

Analysis of the book, historical context, impact and significance, the lincoln highway book ending explained.

The book under review provides a comprehensive exploration of the Lincoln Highway, delving into its historical significance and the multitude of stories that have unfolded along its path. Here is a summary of the key aspects covered in the book:

• The Lincoln Highway’s Route: The book offers a detailed account of the Lincoln Highway’s route, highlighting the towns, landmarks, and landscapes that travelers encountered along the way. It traces the highway’s journey from its eastern starting point in New York City, through the Midwest, and all the way to its western terminus in San Francisco.
• Historical Context: The book sets the stage by providing historical context, offering insights into the societal and technological developments that led to the construction of the Lincoln Highway. It explores the motivations behind its creation, including the desire for a direct transcontinental route and the need to promote automobile travel.
• Notable Figures: The book introduces readers to the notable figures associated with the Lincoln Highway, from the visionaries who conceived the idea to the engineers, businessmen, and travelers who contributed to its realization. It brings to life the stories of these individuals and their roles in shaping the highway’s legacy.
• Travel Experiences: The book paints a vivid picture of the travel experiences along the Lincoln Highway. It captures the challenges faced by early motorists, such as unpaved roads, lack of amenities, and the need for resourcefulness. Additionally, it explores the diverse encounters and adventures that unfolded as travelers made their way across the country.
• Impact and Legacy: The book examines the lasting impact of the Lincoln Highway on American society, economy, and culture. It explores how the highway facilitated the growth of towns and businesses along its route, as well as its influence on the development of roadside attractions, motels, and the concept of the American road trip.
• Preservation Efforts: The book delves into the ongoing preservation efforts dedicated to maintaining the historical significance of the Lincoln Highway. It discusses the initiatives taken to preserve original segments, markers, and landmarks, as well as the establishment of museums and organizations focused on commemorating the highway’s legacy.

In this section, we will analyze the book’s content, evaluating the author’s writing style, historical accuracy, and overall strengths and weaknesses. Here is a closer examination of the book:

• Writing Style: The author’s writing style plays a crucial role in engaging readers and effectively conveying the information. We assess whether the author employs a narrative approach, weaving together historical facts, personal anecdotes, and descriptive language to create a compelling and immersive reading experience. Additionally, we consider the book’s organization and structure, evaluating how well the content flows and transitions between different aspects of the Lincoln Highway’s story.
• Historical Accuracy: Historical accuracy is a fundamental aspect of any book centered around historical events. We delve into the depth of research undertaken by the author, assessing the reliability of the sources utilized and the level of factual accuracy presented. It is important to note if the book includes references, footnotes, or a bibliography, indicating a commitment to scholarly research and a transparent approach to historical documentation.
• Thematic Exploration: The book’s exploration of key themes related to the Lincoln Highway is another aspect we analyze. We assess whether the author delves beyond surface-level descriptions and delves into the societal, cultural, or economic implications of the highway’s construction and its impact on different regions and communities. Does the book provide thought-provoking insights or present unique perspectives on the subject matter?
• Engaging Narrative: A well-written book should have the ability to captivate readers and hold their attention throughout the journey. We consider whether the book succeeds in presenting the Lincoln Highway’s story in an engaging manner, ensuring that readers remain invested in the narrative. Are there captivating anecdotes, personal stories, or historical events that bring the highway’s history to life?
• Comprehensive Coverage: A thorough analysis of the book also involves assessing its comprehensiveness. Does the book cover a wide range of topics related to the Lincoln Highway, such as its construction, impact on local communities, or the experiences of travelers? We evaluate whether the book offers a well-rounded understanding of the highway’s significance, taking into account various perspectives and aspects of its history.
• Critical Evaluation: Finally, we critically evaluate the book’s strengths and weaknesses. Are there any notable gaps in the coverage of certain aspects of the Lincoln Highway’s history? Does the author present a balanced portrayal of the subject matter, addressing potential controversies or differing viewpoints? We weigh the book’s overall contribution to the field of Lincoln Highway studies and its potential value to readers interested in the topic.

Background information on the Lincoln Highway

• Origins of the Idea: This section explores the historical context that led to the conception of the Lincoln Highway. It provides insights into the need for a transcontinental route to connect the East Coast and the West Coast, highlighting the economic, social, and cultural factors that influenced the highway’s creation.
• Engineering and Construction Challenges: The book delves into the engineering and construction challenges faced during the development of the Lincoln Highway. It discusses the technological advancements of the time, such as the use of concrete, and the innovative approaches employed to overcome geographical obstacles like mountains, rivers, and deserts.
• Funding and Support: The historical context of the Lincoln Highway would be incomplete without discussing the financial and political aspects. The book may explore the funding sources, including private and public contributions, and the support garnered from influential figures, organizations, and government entities.

Discussion of the book’s portrayal of the historical context

• Comprehensive Coverage: The book’s portrayal of the historical context is evaluated for its comprehensiveness. Does it provide a well-rounded understanding of the societal, cultural, and economic factors that influenced the development of the Lincoln Highway? Does the author delve into the motivations, challenges, and aspirations of the individuals involved in its creation?
• Contextual Analysis: The book’s analysis of the historical context is examined for its depth and insight. Does it offer a nuanced understanding of the broader historical events and trends surrounding the Lincoln Highway’s construction? Does the author connect the highway’s development to larger narratives of American history, such as the rise of the automobile industry or the impact of westward expansion?

Comparison to other historical accounts or perspectives

• Existing Historical Accounts: This section assesses whether the book offers a fresh perspective or contributes new information to the existing body of historical literature on the Lincoln Highway. Are there significant differences or contradictions between the book’s account and other well-established historical narratives? Does the author challenge or expand upon existing interpretations of the highway’s historical context?
• Inclusion of Diverse Perspectives: The book’s inclusion of diverse perspectives is considered in relation to the historical context. Does the author incorporate the voices and experiences of various individuals and communities affected by the construction and use of the Lincoln Highway? Does it shed light on the experiences of marginalized groups, such as women, minorities, or indigenous peoples, within the historical context of the highway?
• Historical Accuracy and Interpretation: This aspect evaluates the book’s adherence to historical accuracy while presenting its interpretation of the historical context. Are there any discrepancies between the book’s portrayal and widely accepted historical facts? Does the author provide a clear rationale and evidence for their interpretation of the historical context?

By examining the background information, the book’s portrayal of the historical context, and its comparison to other historical accounts or perspectives, readers can gain a deeper understanding of the broader historical landscape surrounding the Lincoln Highway’s creation and development.

Examination of the book’s impact on understanding the Lincoln Highway

• Enhanced Understanding: The book’s impact on understanding the Lincoln Highway is evaluated, considering whether it provides new insights, perspectives, or previously unknown details about the highway’s history. Does the book uncover lesser-known stories or shed light on overlooked aspects of the highway’s significance?
• Cultural and Historical Appreciation: The book’s impact on fostering a deeper appreciation for the cultural and historical significance of the Lincoln Highway is assessed. Does it bring attention to the diverse communities, landmarks, and historical events associated with the highway? Does it inspire readers to explore and engage with the Lincoln Highway’s legacy?

Discussion of the book’s contribution to the field of history or transportation studies

• Advancements in Historical Research: The book’s contribution to the field of history is considered, particularly in terms of its potential to advance scholarship on the Lincoln Highway. Does it offer a fresh perspective or introduce new research findings? Does it contribute to ongoing conversations and debates within the field?
• Transportation Studies: The book’s contribution to the field of transportation studies is explored. Does it provide valuable insights into the impact of the Lincoln Highway on transportation history and the development of road networks? Does it examine the influence of the highway on subsequent transportation infrastructure or policies?

Reflection on the book’s relevance to contemporary issues

• Tourism and Travel: The book’s relevance to contemporary issues related to tourism and travel is examined. Does it offer lessons or perspectives that can be applied to current travel experiences? Does it address the role of heritage tourism or the preservation of historic roads in the present day?
• Infrastructure and Development: The book’s relevance to contemporary discussions surrounding infrastructure and development is considered. Does it provide insights into the historical challenges and successes of constructing a transcontinental highway? Does it prompt reflections on the significance of transportation infrastructure in shaping economic growth and regional connectivity?
• Preservation Efforts: The book’s reflection on preservation efforts surrounding the Lincoln Highway is explored. Does it raise awareness about the need to protect and preserve historical landmarks, roadside attractions, or sections of the highway? Does it inspire readers to engage with preservation initiatives or contribute to the safeguarding of transportation heritage?

By assessing the book’s impact on understanding the Lincoln Highway, its contribution to history and transportation studies, and its relevance to contemporary issues, we can gauge its broader significance and the lasting implications of its insights and narratives.

The Lincoln Highway book does not have a traditional narrative with a specific ending as it is a historical exploration rather than a fictional story. Instead, it concludes by tying together the various themes and narratives explored throughout the book. It may highlight the lasting impact of the Lincoln Highway on American society, economy, and culture, emphasizing its role in shaping the development of towns, businesses, and the concept of the American road trip. The book may also reflect on the ongoing preservation efforts dedicated to maintaining the historical significance of the Lincoln Highway and its importance as a cultural heritage. Ultimately, the ending of the Lincoln Highway book provides a sense of closure by summarizing the key insights and leaving readers with a deeper appreciation for the significance and legacy of this iconic transcontinental route.

In conclusion, the book review of the Lincoln Highway provides a comprehensive and engaging exploration of this iconic transcontinental roadway. Through its summary of the book, analysis of its content, and examination of its impact and significance, readers are granted a deeper understanding of the historical context, stories, and cultural importance associated with the Lincoln Highway.

The book’s portrayal of the historical context offers a comprehensive and well-rounded understanding of the societal, cultural, and economic factors that shaped the construction of the Lincoln Highway. It delves into the motivations, challenges, and aspirations of the individuals involved, providing readers with a broader perspective on this monumental project.

Moreover, the book’s impact on understanding the Lincoln Highway is noteworthy. It brings to light lesser-known stories, uncovers overlooked aspects, and fosters a deeper appreciation for the cultural and historical significance of the highway. Through its contribution to history and transportation studies, the book advances scholarship, introduces new insights, and enriches ongoing conversations within these fields.

The book’s relevance to contemporary issues is also significant. It prompts reflections on the present-day implications of tourism and travel, infrastructure and development, and preservation efforts. By drawing connections between the past and the present, it encourages readers to engage with the lessons and legacies of the Lincoln Highway in our modern world.

Overall, the book review serves as a valuable resource for those interested in the history, culture, and significance of the Lincoln Highway. It offers an engaging narrative, presents a wealth of information, and invites readers to embark on a journey through time and across the diverse landscapes of America. Through its exploration of the historical context, contribution to scholarship, and relevance to contemporary issues, the book review provides a comprehensive understanding of the Lincoln Highway and its enduring impact on American history and culture.

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Rebel Wagner Forces, Threatening March to Moscow, Abruptly Stand Down

The mercenary group had seized the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, the center of Moscow’s military operations in Ukraine, posing a grave threat to President Vladimir Putin’s government.

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By Paul Sonne

A domestic security crisis that threatened the government of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia appeared to ease late Saturday, when a mercenary tycoon, whose forces had seized critical facilities in southern Russia and begun an armed march on Moscow, abruptly stood down after cutting a deal that allowed him and his fighters to escape prosecution.

The mercenary leader, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, who had brazenly seized control of the Southern Military District headquarters in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don and stationed his fighters and tanks on the streets, demanding a change to the Russian military leadership, said his Wagner private military company had made it within 200 kilometers (about 124 miles) of Moscow, the capital, without injuring any of its fighters.

But he said the group had reached the point where Russian blood was about to be spilled “on one side.” And out of a sense of responsibility, he would turn his forces around and send them back to their field camps.

Many questions remained unanswered as the day ended in Moscow, but the outlines of a deal Mr. Prigozhin had negotiated began to come into focus. Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, the leader of Belarus and a close Putin ally, mediated the agreement.

The Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, told reporters that under the deal, Mr. Prigozhin would go to Belarus, and the criminal case opened against him for organizing an armed insurrection would be dropped.

The Wagner fighters who did not participate in the uprising would be given the option of signing Russian Defense Ministry contracts, Mr. Peskov said, and the rest would avoid prosecution, considering their “heroic deeds on the front.”

“There was a higher goal — to avoid bloodshed, to avoid an internal confrontation, to avoid clashes with unpredictable consequences,” Mr. Peskov said. “It was in the name of these goals that Lukashenko’s mediation efforts were realized, and President Putin made the corresponding decisions.”

As for Mr. Prigozhin’s demands to end the “disgrace” of the Russian military leadership, the Kremlin spokesman said such personnel decisions were exclusively the domain of the Russian commander in chief and scarcely could be subject to such negotiations.

The announcement by the Kremlin capped a calamitous day that began with Mr. Prigozhin’s flaunting his brazen seizure of the military offices. It continued with an emergency televised national address by Mr. Putin, in which the Russian leader vowed to put down the armed mutiny and derided the Wagner fighters as traitors stabbing the motherland in the back.

Russia, Mr. Putin warned, risked spiraling anew into a tragedy akin to the Russian Civil War from 1917 to 1922, when “Russians were killing Russians and brothers were killing brothers.”

“We will not allow this to happen again,” he said. “We will protect our people and our statehood from any threats, including from internal betrayal.”

The Russian leader, who did not mention Mr. Prigozhin by name in his recorded remarks, said “inflated ambitions and personal interests” had led to treason, and he vowed the harshest punishment for anyone who had “consciously chosen the path of betrayal.”

He admitted that the situation in Rostov-on-Don, a city of about 1.1 million people, was difficult, saying: “In effect, the work of civil and military institutions has been blocked.”

The dramatic moves by Wagner — which for years did Mr. Putin’s shadowy geopolitical bidding in nations abroad and suffered profound losses on the battlefield in Ukraine before turning its sights on Russia itself — represented the biggest domestic blowback Mr. Putin had faced since launching his war in Ukraine last year.

For a brief moment, the group of fighters appeared to pose one of the gravest threats to the Russian president’s leadership since he took power more than 23 years ago, and showed the risk posed by armed formations operating outside of government control.

The head-spinning sequence of events that played out in less than 24 hours plunged a nation already struggling to wage the war in Ukraine into a full-blown domestic crisis, pitting a Russian president seeking to squelch domestic dissent against a former convict and caterer turned mercenary boss, who once helped a beleaguered Russia on the battlefield but eventually became a political liability for the Kremlin.

In the middle of the day on Saturday, with Mr. Prigozhin apparently in control of central Rostov-on-Don and initially refusing to back down, there appeared to be relatively few ways out of the crisis that would not involve clashes within Russia or risk a significant loss of lives.

Regional officials along the major M-4 highway linking Rostov-on-Don to Moscow, about 600 miles north, had said that convoys of military equipment were barreling north on the highway and urged local residents to stay away.

Videos verified by The New York Times showed signs of active fighting along the highway south of the city of Voronezh, including helicopters and a destroyed truck along the road, after reports that Wagner fighters had entered the Voronezh region, which is halfway between Rostov and Moscow.

“We’re blockading the city of Rostov and going to Moscow,” Mr. Prigozhin had said early in the day in the courtyard of the military headquarters.

The Russian Defense Ministry, addressing the Wagner fighters directly in a statement, told them they had been tricked into Mr. Prigozhin’s “criminal adventure” and would be guaranteed safety if they contacted the authorities.

Perhaps the most shocking scene of the day came when footage surfaced of Mr. Prigozhin in control of the Southern Military District headquarters, where he appeared to have two top Russian military officials surrounded by Wagner guards.

In the video, Mr. Prigozhin demanded to meet with Russia’s top military officer, Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov, and the country’s defense minister, Sergei K. Shoigu, to end what he described as a “disgrace.”

“We came here,” Mr. Prigozhin says. “We want the chief of the general staff and Shoigu. So long as they are not here, we will be staying here.”

Throughout the video, Mr. Prigozhin sat casually between the two uncomfortable Russian officials — a deputy defense minister, Col. Gen. Yunus-bek Yevkurov, and a deputy military intelligence chief, Lt. Gen. Vladimir Alekseyev — as he criticized the Russian military’s poor leadership in Ukraine.

General Yevkurov asked Mr. Prigozhin to let the regular soldiers from the military district’s headquarters leave. “Absolutely not,” Mr. Prigozhin replied, before berating the general for killing fighters by “throwing them into a meat grinder” in Ukraine “without any ammunition, any thought or any plans.”

Mr. Prigozhin berated the general for showing disrespect by referring to him using the informal “you” in Russian, and said if the Russian military had been able to talk with his group in a normal tone, he wouldn’t have had to come.

General Yevkurov later asked whether Mr. Prigozhin saw the actions he was taking as justified. “They’re absolutely correct,” Mr. Prigozhin said. “We are saving Russia.”

By the end of the day, Wagner fighters had maneuvered a tank out from where they had parked it between the gates of the Rostov-on-Don circus, and Mr. Prigozhin was photographed waving goodbye out the window of a vehicle.

The situation created by Mr. Prigozhin initially seemed like a dramatic denouement for a man who spent years in prison during the Soviet era but rose to riches after making inroads with Mr. Putin in St. Petersburg in the 1990s and winning government catering contracts.

Last year, he stepped into the spotlight as Wagner took on a greater role in prosecuting Moscow’s struggling war effort in Ukraine, eventually wresting control of the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut amid staggering losses.

The situation led to a harsh rivalry between Mr. Prigozhin and top Russian military leaders that burst out into the open as he released expletive-laden public videos assailing them for incompetence.

The infighting between Mr. Prigozhin’s force and the Russian military for months appeared untenable, with the expectation that Mr. Putin would ultimately take action to curb the disunity. But then, nothing happened.

In audio recordings released late Friday night, Mr. Prigozhin suggested that Moscow had finally sided with the Russian military and accused the Defense Ministry of launching an attack against a Wagner camp in Ukraine, an accusation that the Russian authorities publicly rebutted.

A Telegram channel affiliated with Wagner on Saturday accused Mr. Putin of triggering the civil unrest himself by refusing to send “one or two degenerates into retirement” and siding with them over “the most battle-ready unit in Russia.”

After Mr. Prigozhin backed down, the Telegram channel, called APWagner, erupted in anger: “I am tearing up my contract.”

How exactly Mr. Prigozhin had planned to outmuscle Russia’s sprawling security services wasn’t clear.

By late Saturday, no units within the Russian military or police appeared to have defected to Wagner, and no prominent Russian officials had expressed open support for the mercenary group. Top officials across Russia released comments supporting Mr. Putin, making the Wagner boss appear isolated.

The popular pro-war Russian blogger Mikhail Zvinchuk, who writes on Telegram under the name Rybar, said that while he wasn’t whitewashing Mr. Prigozhin’s actions, the mercenary boss “gave voice to all those problems and weak links that it became unacceptable to discuss aloud.”

Mr. Zvinchuk noted that Mr. Putin not only ignored Mr. Prigozhin in his remarks, but also did not mention the defense minister or the chief of the general staff, “which says a lot.”

Considering there appeared to be some sort of agreement with Mr. Prigozhin, the question of whether there would be consequences for the Russian defense minister and top military officer remained, the blogger added.

Despite one of the most significant threats to Russian national security in years, neither had said anything all day.

Reporting was contributed by Anton Troianovski , Anatoly Kurmanaev , Valerie Hopkins and Neil MacFarquhar .

Paul Sonne is a foreign correspondent for The Times, focusing on Russia and Ukraine. More about Paul Sonne

Our Coverage of the War in Ukraine

News and Analysis

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has signed into law three measures aimed at replenishing the ranks of his country’s depleted army, including lowering the draft age to 25 .

With continued American aid to Ukraine stalled and against the looming prospect of a second Trump presidency, NATO officials are looking to take more control of directing military support from Ukraine’s allies  — a role that the United States has played for the past two years.

Exploding drones hit an oil refinery and munitions factory far to the east of Moscow, in what Ukrainian media and military experts said was among the longest-range strikes with Ukrainian drones so far in the war .

Conditional Support: Ukraine wants a formal invitation to join NATO, but NATO has no appetite for taking on a new member  that, because of the alliance’s covenant of collective security, would draw it into the biggest land war in Europe since 1945.

“Shell Hunger”: A desperate shortage of munitions in Ukraine  is warping tactics and the types of weapons employed. What few munitions remain are often mismatched with battlefield needs as the country’s forces prepare for an expected Russian offensive this summer.

Turning to Marketing: Ukraine’s troop-starved brigades have started their own recruitment campaigns  to fill ranks depleted in the war with Russia.

How We Verify Our Reporting

Our team of visual journalists analyzes satellite images, photographs , videos and radio transmissions  to independently confirm troop movements and other details.

We monitor and authenticate reports on social media, corroborating these with eyewitness accounts and interviews. Read more about our reporting efforts .

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Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War Hardcover – Illustrated, September 20, 2016

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Gripping narrative nonfiction that tells the dramatic story of a remarkable young Texan pianist, Van Cliburn, who played his way through the wall of fear built by the Cold War, won the hearts of the American and Russian people, and eased tensions between two superpowers on the brink of nuclear war.

In 1958, an unheralded twenty-three-year-old piano prodigy from Texas named Van Cliburn traveled to Moscow to compete in the First International Tchaikovsky Competition. The Soviets had no intention of bestowing their coveted prize on an unknown American; a Russian pianist had already been chosen to win. Yet when the gangly Texan with the shy grin began to play, he instantly captivated an entire nation.

The Soviet people were charmed by Van Cliburn’s extraordinary talent and fresh-faced innocence, but it was his palpable love for the music that earned their devotion; for many, he played more like a Russian than their own musicians. As enraptured crowds mobbed Cliburn’s performances, pressure mounted to award him the competition prize. "Is he the best?" Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev demanded of the judges. "In that case . . . give him the prize!"

Adored by millions in the USSR, Cliburn returned to a thunderous hero’s welcome in the USA and became, for a time, an ambassador of hope for two dangerously hostile superpowers. In this thrilling, impeccably researched account, Nigel Cliff recreates the drama and tension of the Cold War era, and brings into focus the gifted musician and deeply compelling figure whose music would temporarily bridge the divide between two dangerously hostile powers.

• Print length 464 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Harper
• Publication date September 20, 2016
• Dimensions 6 x 1.44 x 9 inches
• ISBN-10 006233316X
• ISBN-13 978-0062333162
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

“With his gold-medal performance in Moscow, Van Cliburn added a human face to the Cold War…A nuanced account.” — New York Times Book Review

“Nigel Cliff… has written a freshly sourced account of these momentous Moscow nights. He places them aptly at the heart of the nuclear conflict and poignantly in the personal odyssey of a lanky, gay pianist from a small prairie town who never wanted to do much except play Russian music.” — Economist

“Absorbing...Cliff is at home in Texan, American, Russian, political and piano cultures. . . . a solid history of a most remarkable young man caught at a most remarkable time. — Dallas Morning News

“An elegant, insightful and ultimately definitive account of one of the 20th century’s most compelling events, and the extraordinary artist and person at the heart of it.” — Houston Chronicle

“[Cliff’s] fresh perspective, combined with deep research and a genuine gift for narrative, restores a neglected chapter of American musical and political history to vivid—and contemporaneously relevant life.”                                                                                                — Madison Searle, Te x as Music

“Brings to life Van Cliburn’s unexpected triumph and its continuing implications for Soviet-American relations through the end of the Cold War… an engaging account of an extraordinary historical moment.” — Shelf Awareness

“Cliburn in Russia offers a fascinating perspective on a decade of nuclear tests, espionage schemes and efforts to close the missile gap. This story is to the Cold War what ping-pong diplomacy was to President Nixon’s opening to China. It is both entertaining and illuminating, and Cliff tells it beautifully.” — Wall Street Journal

“A beautifully done biography of one of the Cold War’s most famous and unlikely characters…” — Boston Globe "Best Book of 2016"

“The newest biography on the life of Van Cliburn is a masterpiece …As an account of the political climate and cultural events that the genius musician found himself in as a young man, MOSCOW NIGHTS may long stand as an enthralling resource for historians, audiophiles, and the general public alike.” — Fort Worth Weekly

“An elegant, insightful and ultimately definitive account of one of the 20th century’s most compelling events, and the extraordinary artist and person at the heart of it.” — Fort Worth Star-Telegram; Houston Chronicle

“Nigel Cliff… has written a freshly sourced account of these momentous Moscow nights. He places them aptly at the heart of the nuclear conflict and poignantly in the personal odyssey of a lanky, gay pianist from a small prairie town who never wanted to do much except play Russian music.” — The Economist

“Cliff… successfully evokes Cliburn’s intuitive musicianship.” — New Yorker

“Astonishing… an engaging, richly detailed account of a remarkable man.” — Christian Science Monitor

“Cliff’s authentic depiction of life during the cold war transports us into a sinister bygone age, while insightful descriptions provide a rare glimpse of [Cliburn’s] sometimes fragile mindset…Cliff’s vivid retelling of the dramatic story and its aftermath will have readers perched on the edge of their seat.” — The Lady

“Part musical biography, part nostalgic look at the hula-hoop era and part Cold War history, MOSCOW NIGHTS strikes the right chord in all respects.” — BookPage

“Essential reading for anyone interested in Cliburn-or in the cultural history of the Cold War.” — Terry Teachout, Commentary

“A thrilling delight…compulsively readable…It’s Vanya all the way in a biography for music lovers, Cold War devotees, and all readers seeking a true feel-great story.” — Booklist (starred review)

“Cliff brilliantly weaves together the politics, personalities, and pianism…A well-researched, fascinating look at a special relationship between Van Cliburn and the U.S.S.R.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A sympathetic yet rounded portrait of the pianist…Highly recommended for readers interested in music (especially classical music and the piano) and the history of the Cold War.” — Library Journal (starred review)

“A rousing, well-researched biography… Throughout the author vividly reprises major historical events…Sweeping history combines with a sensitive rendering of Cliburn’s extraordinary passion.” — Kirkus, Starred Review

From the Back Cover

In 1958, an unheralded twenty-three-year-old piano prodigy from Texas named Van Cliburn traveled to Moscow to compete in the first International Tchaikovsky Competition. The Soviets had no intention of bestowing their coveted prize on an unknown American; a Soviet pianist had already been chosen to win. Yet when the gangly Texan with the shy grin took the stage and began to play, he instantly captivated an entire nation.

The Soviet people were charmed by Cliburn’s extraordinary talent, passion, and fresh-faced innocence, but it was his palpable love for the music that earned their devotion; for many, he played more like a Russian than their own musicians. As enraptured crowds mobbed Cliburn’s performances, pressure mounted to award him the competition prize. “Is he the best?” Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev demanded of the judges. “In that case . . . give him the prize!”

Adored by millions in the USSR, Cliburn returned to a thunderous hero’s welcome in the United States and became, for a time, an ambassador of hope and peace. In this thrilling, impeccably researched account, Nigel Cliff recreates the drama and tension of the Cold War era, and brings into focus the gifted musician and deeply compelling figure whose music would temporarily bridge the divide between two dangerously hostile powers.

About the Author

Nigel Cliff is a historian, biographer, and translator. His first book, The Shakespeare Riots , was a finalist for the National Award for Arts Writing and was chosen as one of the Washington Post ’s best books of the year. His second book, The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco da Gama , was a New York Times Notable Book. His most recent book is a translation and edition of The Travels by Marco Polo. A former film and theater critic for the London Times and contributor to The Economist , he writes for a range of publications, including the New York Times Book Review. A Fellow of Harris Manchester College, Oxford, he lives in London.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper; Illustrated edition (September 20, 2016)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 464 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 006233316X
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0062333162
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.58 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.44 x 9 inches
• #22 in Canadian Historical Biographies
• #1,326 in Traveler & Explorer Biographies
• #1,660 in Political Leader Biographies

About the author

Nigel cliff.

Nigel Cliff is a historian, biographer, and critic. He was educated at Oxford University, where he was awarded the Beddington Prize for English Literature. He is a former theater and film critic for the London Times and a contributor to The Economist and other publications. His first book, The Shakespeare Riots, was a finalist for the National Award for Arts Writing and was selected as one of the best nonfiction books of 2007 by the Washington Post. He lives in London with his wife, the ballerina Viviana Durante, and their son.

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