An obvious one: Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Lolita could be considered a road story.

Also, As I Lay Dying. Sort of.

Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent.

A very short road story: A Good Man is Hard to Find

also The Grapes of Wrath

There are also a couple of collections of Ernie Pyle's travel newspaper columns out there.

Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles? I guess that's not an American landscape.

Steve Martin's The Pleasure of My Company. (High-functioning autistic or similar goes on a cross-country road trip.)

The whole "Little House" series by Laura Ingalls Wilder might count, too.

A Member of the Wedding.

(Curses. I'm looking at my bookshelf and 80% of my books are by British authors, set in England or some world-shifted variant thereof. I am USELESS.)

The tradition of writing about journeys doesn't have its origins in American literature, but it probably reaches its fullest expression in works by American authors.

You'd be surprised. It reaches its fullest expression in two works by the very British Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water.

How about John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra? Or The Journals of Lewis and Clark? Or Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (I know it's not a journey book per se but it has some of the elements).

Daggone that "American" criteria. Stranger in the Forest: On Foot Across Borneo by Eric Hansen is absolutely brilliant journey writing.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

If you want juvenile literature: Henry Reed's Journey, by Keith Robertson.

Stephen King: The Stand, The Long Walk, The Talisman

Tom Robbins' Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

You'd be surprised.

Not really. There are some excellent works by British and other European authors involving travel, but I really think that the road story is more characteristic of American literature than any other nation's. A lot's been said about it - the physical nature of the continent, the vast distances united by industrial transportation networks, our tradition of self-reinvention. That's not to say that other nations don't produce good journey literature (I mean, you have to start with things like the Odyssey, and Exodus) but it would be hard to find another nation in which so very many of the Titan titles are road stories.

excellent works by British and other European authors involving travel*

*The Canterbury Tales being a damned fine example, too

Well, there's Thelma and Louise.

MuddDude and I just watched Transamerica, which is also a road story in many senses.

Sorry, these are movies. I don't really read any more.

• My Year of Meats by Ruth L. Ozeki is a road story of sorts, about a female documentarian traveling around America to do a Japanese show featuring meat. It's very feminist, and it gets into a lot of the grisly details of the meat industry, and it also gives you little peaks into the lives of a lot of different women around the country, as well as one in Japan.

• The Tillerman Cycle, a YA series by Cynthia Voigt, is most definitely a road story. Starts out with Homecoming, in which a girl walks her brothers and sister from Connecticut to Maryland. The whole series is sort of about journeys, and it is all really exceptionally good, possibly the best YA lit in the last half of the 20th century.

Oy. I wish you'd include Canadians. Canada has some good road stories. Look, even if it's not on your list, you've got to read the Deptford Trilogy by Roberston Davies. It's just brilliant, is what it is. You've got to read it. That's all I'm saying.

the road story is more characteristic of American literature than any other nation's.

Well, sure, America may be a richer harvest overall, but that's not what I'm addressing: those two books are worth reading even if your project is specific to America, because they are the best travel books ever.

If Canadians are included you have to consider The Incredible Journey by Sheila Burnford. That's the ultimate road trip.

Oh and The Long Haul. Written by Albert Bezzerides in the 30s. It's the story of drive-by-night truckers who haul fruit between PA and NC. A good read and a good road tale.

I'm disappointed in myself that I didn't think of this earlier: Colin Fletcher. It's been a long time since I've read The Thousand Mile Summer, in which he documents his walk across the length of California in 1958, but I re-read The Man Who Walked Through Time a couple of years ago and can recommend it without reservation. Fletcher was one of the first to hike the Grand Canyon from end to end, and he detailed the journey, both physical and mental, quite nicely.

Blood Meridian.

if you want to expand it to all of the Americas there's always "The Motorcycle Diaries" which is phenominal.

Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. He spent nine months traveling around the United States during 1831-2.

Tim Cahill's Road Fever, about a trip from the tip of South America to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska.

Not American, but a road story: Jose Saramago's The Stone Raft.

Thanks for reminding me I wanted to rent Two-Lane Blacktop.