Recommendations
Books Like The Lincoln Highway
Best books to read after The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles
Amor Towles's The Lincoln Highway is the American road novel of 1954 — Emmett Watson and his brother Billy hijacked from their journey west. These recommendations continue the Towles canon, explore the American road fiction tradition, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the novel that uses a journey to examine American character.
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A Gentleman in Moscow
by Amor Towles
The essential Towles companion — Count Rostov under house arrest in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow for thirty-two years; shares The Lincoln Highway's elegantly structured narrative, its wit, and its conviction that character is the most interesting thing in the world.
- 2Buy
Rules of Civility
by Amor Towles
The first Towles novel — Katey Kontent in New York City in 1938, rising through Manhattan society; the companion for Towles readers who want his full canon, written before A Gentleman in Moscow and The Lincoln Highway.
- 3Buy
On the Road
by Jack Kerouac
The foundational American road novel — Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty driving back and forth across America in the late 1940s; the novel that established the American road as the space where character is formed and identity tested, which The Lincoln Highway explicitly reworks.
- 4Buy
True Grit
by Charles Portis
The American journey with a precocious child companion — Mattie Ross hiring Rooster Cogburn to pursue her father's killer, Portis's comic western sharing The Lincoln Highway's structure of a competent young protagonist navigating a world of unreliable adults.
- 5Buy
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
by Mark Twain
The great American river journey predecessor — Huck Finn and Jim on a raft down the Mississippi, the American novel that most directly established the tradition The Lincoln Highway works in: a young person's journey as a test of American character and conscience.
- 6Buy
Cannery Row
by John Steinbeck
The Steinbeck American companions companion — the community of Cannery Row in Monterey, California, sharing The Lincoln Highway's love of eccentric American characters and its warmth toward the people society has pushed to the margins.
- 7Buy
The Outsiders
by S.E. Hinton
The young protagonist American journey companion — the Greasers and Socs of Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1965, Hinton's celebrated YA novel sharing The Lincoln Highway's interest in what honor and loyalty look like among boys who have not been treated fairly by the world.
- 8Buy
Lonesome Dove
by Larry McMurtry
The epic American journey companion — Gus McCrae and Call driving a cattle herd from Texas to Montana, McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize winner and the other great American road novel of character in which the journey is really a test of what it means to be a certain kind of man in America.
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