Reading Order
The Lincoln Highway Reading Order
The Lincoln Highway (2021) by Amor Towles is a novel set over ten days in June 1954, beginning on the day eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is released from a work farm in Kansas and driven home to Nebraska by the warden. Emmett's plan is simple: pick up his eight-year-old brother Billy and drive to California to start over. But two friends from the work farm — Woolly and Duchess — have stowed away in the warden's trunk, and their own plans redirect the journey to New York, transforming a simple road trip into something more digressive, more dangerous, and ultimately more moving. Told in multiple voices across a single week, The Lincoln Highway is Towles's most formally adventurous novel — a meditation on American mobility, the stories we tell about ourselves, and what it means to keep going.
Where to start
The Lincoln Highway (2021)
Complete The Lincoln Highway Book List
- 1Buy
The Lincoln Highway
Amor Towles·2021 - 2Buy
A Gentleman in Moscow
Amor Towles·2016·Towles's previous novel — more intimate in scale but similarly sustained by warmth, wit, and memorable characters. - 3Buy
Rules of Civility
Amor Towles·2011·Towles's debut — 1938 New York, more stylistically austere than his later work.
The Lincoln Highway — Frequently Asked Questions
Is The Lincoln Highway part of a series?
No — all of Amor Towles's novels are standalones. The Lincoln Highway has no connection to Rules of Civility or A Gentleman in Moscow.
What is the Lincoln Highway?
The Lincoln Highway was the first transcontinental automobile road in the United States, running from New York to San Francisco — 3,389 miles, established in 1913. In the novel it operates both literally (as a route) and symbolically (as an American promise of movement and self-invention).
What order should I read Amor Towles's novels?
Publication order works well: Rules of Civility (2011), A Gentleman in Moscow (2016), then The Lincoln Highway (2021). Most readers recommend starting with A Gentleman in Moscow, which is his most accessible and beloved novel, then going in either direction.
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