The Lincoln Highway Study Guide

Amor Towles spent his childhood in the Boston area of Massachusetts. After graduating from Yale College, he received a master’s degree in English from Stanford University, and later went on to work at an investment profession in New York City. He worked in finance for over 20 years, and he wrote his debut novel Rules of Civility while still working full-time on Wall Street. When Rules of Civility became a bestseller, Towles stepped away from the world of finance and started writing full-time. He quickly began working on two other novels, A Gentleman in Moscow (which he published in 2016 to critical acclaim) and The Lincoln Highway. He currently lives in Manhattan with his wife and two children.

The Lincoln Highway takes place in the aftermath of World War II, and several characters are affected by the war––Ulysses’s wife leaves him for enlisting, and Charlie Watson faces mockery for avoiding armed service. The 1950s setting also informs the characters’ attitudes towards race, as characters and institutions direct racist abuse at Black characters like Townhouse and Ulysses. The history of the actual Lincoln Highway is discussed in the book––it was one of the first transcontinental highways in the United States, as well as one of the first roads designed specifically for automobiles. The highway was not established by a government organization, but by the Lincoln Highway Association, a group of automobile enthusiasts led by entrepreneur Carl G. Fisher. After Congress authorized the road’s construction, the founders demonstrated the highway by driving from New York to California, just as Emmett and Billy set out to do at the end of the novel.

The Lincoln Highway shares similarities with classic works of American literature that use long journeys as sites of character study and exploration of societal themes, such as John Steinbeck’s 1939 classic Grapes of Wrath. Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel On the Road follows two young men on a road trip across America, and, like The Lincoln Highway, uses a cross-country road trip to explore themes of coming of age, brotherhood, and American identity. As I Lay Dying, a 1930 novel by William Faulkner, is about a different kind of road trip––a family bringing their mother’s body to her family burial ground––but it also chronicles the difficulties of travel and explores different points of view told in different narrative styles. A contemporary entry in this literary tradition is the 2019 novel This Tender Land, by William Kent Kruger, which follows four young men traveling across the rivers of America after fleeing a brutal residential school in 1932.