A Hoosier Holiday

In 1916, when this long out-of-print book was originally published, the road novel was a very different thing. The road did not go on forever, there were no rest areas, no giant billboards, no four-lane highways of solid asphalt. What it had was its towns and villages, and the people that resided within them. In 1914, Dreiser, the author of such works as Sister Carrie, The Financier and The Titan, decided to visit his old Indiana haunts, many of which he had not seen since his boyhood. Along for the ride are pal Franklin Booth, an illustrator of note, and Speed or Bert, two wily ""drivers"" (read: chauffeurs). The tony travelers risk blown tires at every turn in an America that has yet to embrace the culture of the automobile. Dreiser sketches a country few today may recognize. Empty beer bottles are thrown into the river. Young children eagerly huddle on the floorboards of roaring automobiles driven by strangers. And each and every town one visits has its own distinct characters and charms. This America--made up of towns like Binghamton, Scranton and Warsaw--seems much more diverse and rugged, even if its roads are made of macadam and washed out by the slightest storm. Because the novella provides a portrait of the artist as a young man and describes the nation as a mosaic of individual cultures, Dreiser's journey offers several different lessons. Part travelogue, part autobiography, part collection of essays, A Hoosier Holiday lays out the landscape of a nation that ceased to exist once the highway unfurled across the map. (Apr.)