Free Air

Sinclair Lewis sends a well-off young woman across the American continent behind the wheel in this 1919 comic romance, one of the earliest road-trip novels. Claire Boltwood, weary of an over-managed courtship and anxious about her overworked father, ships her roadster to Minneapolis and points it west toward cousins in Seattle, her father riding along as chaperone. On the rough roads between Minnesota and the Pacific she keeps crossing paths with Milt Daggett, a small-town garage mechanic who follows her across the country with a cat named Vere de Vere for company. The real obstacle is not the mud or the mountains but the gulf of class between them. Written the year before Main Street made Lewis famous, it is a bright, observant story about self-reliance and the distance between how Americans talk about equality and how they live it.