¹ Whitman, Walt, “Song of the Open Road,” Poetry Foundation (1856)Google Scholar, at www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178711.

² Springsteen, Bruce, Born to Run (Columbia, 1975)Google Scholar.

³ Stein, Gertrude, “The Gradual Making of the Making of Americans,” in Stein, Selected Writings, ed. Van, Carl Vechten (New York: Random House, 1946), 211–29, 226Google Scholar.

⁴ Reichardt, Kelly, Old Joy (Kino International, 2006)Google Scholar.

⁵ Reichardt, Kelly, Wendy and Lucy (Soda, 2008)Google Scholar.

⁶ Reichardt, Kelly, Meek's Cutoff (Oscilloscope Pictures, 2010)Google Scholar.

⁷ This section is not intended as an exhaustive survey of the road's appearance in American postwar culture: such an enormous undertaking, which would have to include an examination of the significance of roads in American music – most notably country music and hard rock – is beyond the scope of the present article. Here instead I take examples of American culture's tendency to mythologize the road and argue for parallels between respective instances.

⁸ Kerouac, Jack, On the Road (New York: Penguin Classics, 2000), 7, 9Google Scholar.

⁹ This is made particularly plain early in the narrative in the association Kerouac establishes between his protagonists and the figure of the cowboy: “Then Omaha, and, by God, the first cowboy I saw, walking along the bleak walls of the wholesale meat warehouses in a ten gallon hat and Texas boots, looked like any beat character of the brickwall dawns of the East except for the getup.” Ibid., 17.

¹⁰ Didion, Joan, Play It as It Lays (London: Fourth Estate, 2011), 18Google Scholar.

¹¹ Ibid., 16.

¹² Ganser, Alexandra, Roads of Her Own: Gendered Space and Mobility in American Women's Road Narratives, 1970–2000 (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009), 218Google Scholar.

¹³ Whitman, “Song of the Open Road,” pt. 15.

¹⁴ Ibid., pt. 13.

¹⁵ Deleuze, Gilles and Parnet, Claire, Dialogues Two (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 125Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Deleuze, Gilles, “Having an Idea in Cinema,” in Deleuze and Guattari, ed. Kaufman, Eleanor and Heller, Kevin J. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 14–19, 18Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Penn, Arthur, Bonnie and Clyde (Warner, 1967)Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Hopper, Dennis, Easy Rider (Columbia Tristar, 1969)Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Scott, Ridley, Thelma & Louise (MGM, 1999)Google Scholar.

²⁰ Laderman, David, Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 1–2Google Scholar.

²¹ See Leong, Ian, Sell, Mike, and Thomas, Kelly, “Mad Love, Mobile Homes, and Dysfunctional Dicks: On the Road with Bonnie and Clyde,” in Cohan, Steven and Hark, Ina Rae, ed., The Road Movie Book (New York: Routledge, 1997), 70–89, 77Google Scholar.

²² Critical attitudes towards the road and the car as its cypher may also be discerned in the work of literary modernists who attempted to bear witness to the changes wrought by the massive increase in car manufacturing in the early decades of the twentieth century. John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer, for instance, emphasizes the threat cars pose to the well-being of city dwellers: “What right have those golblamed automoebiles got racin round the city knocking down wimen an children?” one of his outraged characters asks. Passos, John Dos, Manhattan Transfer (New York: Penguin Classics, 2000), 34Google Scholar.

²³ Eliot Henry Fackler, “Protesting Portland's Freeways: Highway Engineering and Citizen Activism in the Interstate Era,” master's thesis, University of Oregon, 2009, 88.

²⁴ Thompson, Gregory L., “Taming the Neighborhood Revolution: Planners, Power Brokers, and the Birth of Neotraditionalism in Portland, Oregon,” Journal of Planning History, 6, 3 (1 Aug. 2007), 226, doi:10.1177/1538513206297457CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁵ Dunn, James, Driving Forces: The Automobile, Its Enemies, and the Politics of Mobility (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1998), 15Google Scholar.

²⁶ Buel, Ronald, Dead End: The Automobile in Mass Transportation (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972), 4Google Scholar.

²⁷ Ibid., 166.

²⁸ Karina Longworth, “Kelly Reichardt Explains ‘Meek's Cutoff,’ Her Latest Road Movie,” 4 May 2011, at www.sfweekly.com/2011-05-04/film/kelly-reichardt-interview-meeks-cutoff-karina-longworth.

²⁹ See William Henry Gray, A History of Oregon, 1792–1849: Drawn from Personal Observation and Authentic Information (1870), available at www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/38607, 360.

³⁰ Goulder, William, Reminiscences: Incidents in the Life of a Pioneer in Oregon and Idaho (Boise: T. Regan, 1909), 124–25Google Scholar, available at http://hdl.handle.net/2027/wu.89067463752.

³¹ Ibid., 131.

³² Clark, Quoted Keith and Tiller, Lowell, Terrible Trail: The Meek Cutoff, 1845 (Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, 1966), 132Google Scholar.

³³ See ibid., 84.

³⁴ Sam Adams, “Interview: Kelly Reichardt and Jon Raymond,” 26 April 2011, at www.avclub.com/article/kelly-reichardt-and-jon-raymond-55095.