A Route 66 Companion Edited by David King Dunaway (review)

“Route 66 is the most famous highway in America, and arguably in the world,” begins Michael Wallis boldly in the foreword to A Route 66 Companion (ix). The next 179 pages proceed to tell us why. From its humble beginning in 1926 to its official demise in 1985—a casualty of the Interstate Highway system—Route 66 carried people, cargo, ideas, and big dreams across the western two-thirds of the United States from Chicago to Santa Monica. It carried me, as a young girl, from our old home in Kansas to a new life in southern California. From the back seat of our Studebaker I saw my first oil wells, Indian trading posts, the Grand Canyon, Hoover Dam, date palms, orange groves, and ultimately the grand Pacific Ocean. This journey imprinted indelibly on my seven-year-old consciousness a lifelong love of the American West.

Route 66 and the mythology that has grown up around it lives in the collective consciousness of most Americans of a certain age. As the first major highway and one of the most influential elements in the development of the American West, the highway evokes many things, whether from personal memory of a life lived along the route, from stories shared by family members who “came west,” or from one of the narratives romanticized by popular media, most notably through the Bobby Troup song, “(Get your kicks on) Route 66” (1946), and the subsequent television series of the same name (early 1960s).

Editor David Dunaway is no stranger to Route 66; in fact, he is largely responsible for keeping alive the history and culture of this highway. Based at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque (located on Route 66), Dunaway has invigorated interest in the highway through oral histories, publications, radio broadcasting, and digital media. As he explains in the introduction, “Route 66 has been misread as a place of nostalgia for a simpler (read variously: innocent, respectful, rural, segregated) era in the United States. The decades most associated in the popular imagination with Route 66—the 1940s and ’50s—are seen as Happy Days, complete with fifties relics—knee socks, Coke bottles, dancing around the jukebox. Yet 66—and its golden era—have another history to tell, one of segregation at bus stops and restaurants and racial profiling of drivers. For too long, Route 66 has been whitened, its multicultural past denied” (xvi).

Dunaway stretches a broad canvas across the western two-thirds of the United States, then fills it in with the local color that defines each landscape. It begins with a selection of pre-highway accounts, including travel accounts by Washington Irving and his traveling companion, Count Albert-Alexandre de Portales. From here on the book is organized geographically. Dunaway explains, “Route 66 cuts across the major bioregions of the North American continent. The glaciated outwash and moraine country of the Midwest, with its licorice-colored fertile valleys: Prairie 66. The vast, blowing, wide-open spaces of the Great Plains, beginning in Oklahoma and stretching through to the Llano Estacado of New Mexico: Plains 66. The high ridges and plateaus of Central and Western New Mexico over the Continental Divide and across Arizona to the Colorado River: Mountain 66. The vast Mojave Desert, high plains, and San Gabriel Valley leading to the Los Angeles basin: Desert 66. And then the lush California coast, where Route 66 ends (or begins): Coastal 66” (31).

Excerpts are short, averaging three to four pages each, selected from a variety of literary forms: essays, novels, poems, and personal accounts. Many authors are well known to readers, such as Washington Irving, Zane Gray, Thomas Wolfe, Vachel Lindsay, Henry Miller, Sylvia Plath, John Steinbeck, Joan Didion, and Aldous Huxley, though readers may be surprised to learn of some of these writers’ association with Route 66. Some contributors call Route 66 home; others write as travelers. Most contributions appear to be written by white males (reflecting the literature of the time), though...