Preface
A few years ago I taught a course entitled "The Machine That Got Away." The course attracted a large number of aspiring engineers, and their interest in machines, together with mine in literature, resulted in an exciting dialogue on the impact of technology on modern culture. Out of that teaching experience came the idea for this book. Since technology per se involved too broad a topic, I decided to concentrate on just one machine. It had to be a machine with which I and most Americans had personal, firsthand experience; it had to affect us in a major way and repeatedly appear, both in a real and symbolic capacity, in American literature and popular culture. Obviously, the machine that best fit all three criteria was the automobile. And from obvious insights, it is hoped, not so obvious books evolve.

What first evolved was a staggering collection of references. They proliferated like the proverbial cars on the highway, and I was constantly having to cut back. Among the important works of literature I was unable to include, for example, were: Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons; William Faulkner Sartoris and Sanctuary; Sinclair Lewis' Dodsworth and Babbit; Theodore Dreiser An American Tragedy; and Arthur Miller's The Death of a Salesman. Others I could only mention in passing. To return to the book I did write, I am indebted to so many people for their assistance: to Cathi Campbell, who typed the final manuscript; to David Galloway who counseled me from Germany--and all over the world; to Roger Salomon and Park Goist who were there when I needed them; and especially to Fred Smith, who gave of his time, insights, patience, and skills in the difficult tasks of organization and writing.

I am also indebted to many friends who took a special interest in what I was doing and generously shared their own ideas and information with me. Among these I would particularly like to thank Doris Goist, Connie Soltz, and Nancy Lampl. Nancy was my constant sounding board, listening to my problems, reading the manuscript as it evolved, lending her own insights and suggestions, and making the book a better one for her efforts. I am immensely grateful for winning the Ralph H. Gabriel Prize in American Studies, which made this publication possible, and to Park Goist, who suggested that I submit the manuscript in the first place. Finally, I would like to thank John Dettelbach, who has, with unfailing support and good humor, lived not only with me but with my ubiquitous yellow pad and typewriter. It is to John that I dedicate this book--a fitting tribute to the man who has its contents seared on his brain from innumerable readings, critiques, and trips to the Xerox machine, and is the only one capable of giving me adequate directions to get somewhere in my real car.
C. G.D.

Introduction: Fumbling for the American Dream
In J. D. Reed Expressways, a book of poems about "the big middle of the country seen through a windshield," the automobile provides the connecting link between the work of art and larger phenomena in American culture. 1 The opening poem, "The Reports Come In," for example, places a hayseed Gulliver against a motorized American landscape:
A country Gulliver
staked down on these plains,
rusted Kaisers and hot
Buicks race out my limbs
trailing dust like overhead shots
in comic books.
Inspected by grocers
and tiny druggists,
I down twenty hogsheads of syrup,
wagonloads of meat loaf.
The reports come in:
young men with .22's
blast roadsigns.
mosquito bumps.
a stuffed trout shudders dust
on the patrons of a roadhouse,
and somewhere in the lamplight
my country lurches from
its cot like a combine lurching
over a field of oats,
and scratching in its underwear,
fumbles for a heritage.
Reed's Gulliver--a neo-Swiftian giant with cars racing out his limbs, and the car radio serving as his nerve and brain center--exemplifies the raw material of this book: the car as it is treated in American art and popular culture. My intent is not merely to accumulate car metaphors or specific automotive references; rather, as Reed has done in his poem, I wish to derive from the created work various insights into the role of the car in American life and thought.

"America," wrote John Jerome, "is a road epic; we have even developed a body of road art, Huck Finn to The Grapes of Wrath to Easy Rider, cutting loose a path to the dream." 2 The following chapters will illustrate and analyze this automobilelinked dream--and its attendant nightmare--within the context of our "road art." Because the artist's orientation is humanistic rather than economic or sociological, his view of the automobile is richer, more complex, and usually more ominous than historical data alone might lead us to believe. Long before our current ecological and energy problems, for example, writers like William Faulkner saw the automobile as a catalyst for crisis in American life. Therefore, to study the car primarily from the perspective of literature and related art forms is to give that study a dimension and drama it would not otherwise have...