How film and fiction convey the experience of America through car trips. The beat-generation writer Jack Kerouac and On the Road's postwar celebratory travel. Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita; the European corruption of American innocence; and travel as fear, amusement, opportunity for escape, and paranoid dream. The movie Thelma and Louise as a feminist buddy film in which the heroines discover things about themselves, each other, and the United States and in which the road represents freedom. Images of the West in Thelma and Louise and the elegiac nature of this and other road-trip films.
