Roads: Driving America's Great Highways

by Larry McMurtry

What I felt then about deep south Texas—that it was a wild place filled with desperate men—is pretty much what I still feel.

Love ends, life ends, but the flow of objects goes on forever.

The one time I stayed in the Fontainebleu an Irish waiter wheeled in my bacon and eggs one morning and, dead drunk, fell facedown in my eggs.

I would try to guess the destination of a given flight just by the look of the people who were about to board it. World-weary cynicism meant Baltimore, hyperactive cynicism Miami or Las Vegas. Trench coats meant Washington, D.C. The gray people, whose cheeks no sunlight seemed ever to have touched, were usually bound for Cleveland or Chicago. A certain stridency of voice meant Newark, or maybe La Guardia . . . and so on.

People bound for Portland or Seattle do not seem to have acquired much regional coloration. Perhaps, at most, they betray a slight tendency to look collegiate.

The opportunity, which came to us almost as soon as we opened, to buy from the libraries of such legendary Washingtonians as Huntington Cairns, James M. Cain, David Bruce, and Alice Roosevelt Longworth was, to young booksellers, extremely exciting.

out west there were only two classes, middle and working.