The Great Northern Express: A Writer's Journey Home

by Howard Frank Mosher

From bestselling, nationally celebrated author Howard Frank Mosher, a wildly funny and deeply personal account of his three-month, 20,000-mile sojourn to discover what he loved enough to live for. Several months before novelist Howard Frank Mosher turned sixty-five, he learned that he had prostate cancer. Following forty-six intensive radiation treatments, Mosher set out alone in his twenty-year-old Chevy Celebrity on a monumental road trip and book tour across twenty-first-century America. From a chance meeting with an angry moose in northern New England to late-night walks on the wildest sides of America's largest cities, The Great Northern Express chronicles Mosher's escapades with an astonishing array of erudite bibliophiles, homeless hitchhikers, country crooners and strippers, and aspiring writers of all circumstances.      Full of high and low comedy and rollicking adventures, this is part travel memoir, part autobiography, and pure, anarchic fun. From coast to coast and border to border, this unforgettable adventure of a top-notch American writer demonstrates that, sometimes, in order to know who we truly are, we must turn the wheel towards home.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Travel, Biography, Humor, Travelogue

258 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 6, 2012

About the author

Howard Frank Mosher was an American author. Over the course of his career, Mr. Mosher published 12 novels, two memoirs and countless essays and book reviews. In addition, his last work of fiction, points North will be published by St. Martin's press in the winter of 2018.

Mosher was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1979. A Stranger In the Kingdom won the New England Book Award for Fiction in 1991, and was later filmed by director Jay Craven. In 2006, Mosher received the Vermont Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts. In 2011 he was awarded the New England Independent Booksellers Association's President's Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Reviews

[Diane Barnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars, rounded up.

Well, that was a treat! Lots of humor, lots of Vermont local lore (it's good to know that all crazy rednecks are not Southern), and a love story of sorts about independent bookstores. Howard takes a trip across the US for a self - organized book tour. He's 65, alone, recovering from radiation therapy, and misses his wife. His 20 year old car is also falling apart. Since he's financing this himself, he mostly stays at Motel 6 and eats at MacDonalds. But none of that stops him from having fun. When he gets lonely, he just pops imaginary people in the passengers seat with him: His dead uncle, Oliver Sacks, Mark Twain, and a beer drinking Jesus. They all give him great advice. He also gives us a mini biography of he and his wife's first year in the Kingdom, way up in NE Vermont, where he still lives.
I have not read any of his fiction yet, most of it set in the Kingdom, but I will remedy that soon. I enjoyed his cross country trip almost as much as he did.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

I absolutely adored this book. I actually found myself smiling (OK, I don't smile or laugh when I'm reading as a rule!) A Vermont treasure, writer Howard Frank Mosher, expecting to (finally!) receive his acceptance to a MacArthur Fellowship instead receives a letter from his doctor that he has prostate cancer. After 46 radiation treatments, instead of heeding the nurse’s suggestion “to relax,” the very next day he takes off on a cross-country independent book tour to promote his latest book. And oh yes, he drove his “Loser Cruiser,” a 20-year car with 200,000-plus miles on it. Along the way, he brings along imaginary friends (his Uncle Reg, Harry Potter, Mark Twain, and others), but woven within these pages are his beginnings in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont as a young groom and first-year teacher and the stories he’s been telling since the 1970s. I’ve been where he lives. It is indeed “God’s Country,” with a furniture factory being the only real job source, unless you commute to Canada or south or are a teacher.

For this “Vermont transplant” (despite living for more than 30 years in the state, I’m not considered a “real Vermonter” as I was born in in New York and also have lived in Ohio and Maine), this introduced to me to people I didn’t know by name, but know by face, in my area just 100 miles south: Prof, Margery, Vivian, and others. The book is also a love letter to his wife, Phillis, the science teacher who patiently sits at home, I swear rolling her eyes at his stories and antics, waiting for the love of her life to return.

While getting himself into some definite pickles (I wondered sometimes, how is he going to get out of THIS one?), he always manages to get out, and is the better for it. While it’s a journey to peddle his book, it’s also a journey to escape illness and to live life to the fullest. Who cares what people think?!

I feel lucky to have met Mosher at Booktopia last month. When I asked about Phillis, he said she was at home taking care of his 96-year old mother. Always the caretaker. But we had a great conversation about Vermont. I plan on giving this book to my dad for Father’s Day, another state adoptee who loves to fish and who is a prostate cancer survivor.

I won’t spoil the ending, but let’s just say the Loser Cruiser has a fitting ending with which I could identify. Every first full week in August, we have “Field Days,” our county’s fair, and the demolition derby on Tuesday night.

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 stars - I really liked The Great Northern Express...and how could I not? The Great Northern Express is at its soul what good old fashioned story telling is all about, a heart-felt skill that may soon be lost.

Howard Frank Mosher invites us on this special journey as he recovers from radiation therapy after a diagnosis with prostate cancer which leaves him staring his own mortality in the face. Not one to sit idly by and wallow in self pity, Howard jumps in his 20 year old Chevy Celebrity, dubbed The Loser Cruiser and sets off on the great American indie book store tour. Weaving the joy of the ride across America with the story of how he grew his roots in northern Vermont in the early 60's , we become privy to what gives Mosher his will to laugh, love and live. Though he sets off on this adventure alone, it's not to say he has no company on is way.

There's nothing like small town America. There's nothing like a great indie book store. Mosher captures both with humor and respect. Well, mostly respect. There's a few stories that are borderline, as in one in which he describes his early days of teaching and his plan to direct his students in a rendition of Our Town with results that go sourly awry.

I'm not quite certain how much of Mosher's stories are embellished but I know the warm feeling I got reading these vignettes rang true.

As for the prognosis of Mr. Mosher's prostate cancer, the jury may still be out. Suffice it to say he's with us still, heartily laughing, writing and living his life. As for the fate of his Loser Cruiser, you'll have to read the book to find out.

20,000+ miles later and a book of memories, Howard Frank Mosher is welcomed home. Long live Mr. Mosher, long live his stories!

[Gail · Rating 1 out of 5]

I started out liking this book but, alas, since I did not finish it, I cannot recommend the book. I did not find any part of it wildly funny or amusing as the publisher says. It left me kind of blah.

[Sharron · Rating 1 out of 5]

I love travel writing but this was a total snooze. So boring.

[Sheila Samuelson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rating: 5 Stars!!
Review:
This was my first time reading a Book by Howard Frank Mosher so i wasnt sure what to expect but i have to say this was an enjoyable and hearttouching Memoir!!

There were 3 Parts to this book Faith, Hope and Love. Each part had a different yet unique story to it. Faith was about how Howard lived in his Faith all his life and decided to write a book about his lifes journey. Hope was about learning he had Prostate Cancer after going for an annual exam in the 1980s and deciding what to do about it. Love was about overcoming oppsticals in life that at times seem like they are tearing us down.

Overall a Good Memoir with many life lessons in it!! Can't wait to explore more books by Howard in the future!!

[ems · Rating 5 out of 5]

a magical memoir about family legacies, independent bookstores & small towns. couldn't have enjoyed a book any more.

[Carol · Rating 2 out of 5]

When I read about this book, I thought it would great. For one thing, I love road trips. For another, I thought that Howard Frank Moser was nudged by his cancer scare into doing something he had longed to do for so many years. He had endured 46 radiation treatments for prostate cancer. I am not familiar with that type of cancer but I have had friends who have had other types of cancer and they did not have so many radiation treatments.

Howard Frank Moser and his uncle had originally planned to go on a cross country trip, visiting the homes of American literary giants, maybe played some sports once in a while and eating at greasy food places. But they never got around to it. A lot of time had passed.

After the cancer scare, his uncle couldn't go with him so he did the trip solo. Being married, I kept wondering, why he didn't take his wife? If it was me, I would have gladly dropped everything and gone with him. Maybe I missed the part where he explains why she stayed home. He did change the purpose of his trip some; he changed it to one very long book tour of 150 towns and cities.

My problem is that I didn't really feel like I was on the trip with him in the book. Many of the tales that he told were of his past life as a teacher not of his experiences on the trip. And the humor seemed off to me. I will give two examples that stuck with me.

Mr. Moser admitted that he was poorly trained to be a teacher. In the early days when one trickster of kid told him that he had a family emergency, he foolishly tossed his own car keys to him. Later, kid was seen driving by the school at sixty miles per hour backwards! Mr. Moser reports that the kid grew up to be a superintendent of schools. It just didn't seem funny to me. What if he had run over a person crossing the street, or even a little child?

The other one was when he was taken to see a cock fight. Thankfully, he keeps the description of the fight short but he concluded that instead keeping the kids out of the mill (the principal told him that was the purpose of his classes) he thought it should be to keep the kids out of the town. That just didn't seem funny to me.

There was a mixture of some of trip stories with a whole of stories about his past. This book just wasn't what I expected and I was so disappointed. There was too little trip and too much past.

Sorry, I cannot make a recommendation for this book.

Although I received this book from the Amazon Vine Program, that in no way influenced my review of this book.

[Trish · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love fishing stories. Lord know why, since I can remember only fishing a couple of times in my life. There is something about the sinuous dance of the line, the exotic choice of flies, the murmur of water, the glint of sun that mesmerizes me. And perhaps there is something about that wily fisherman hatching his next story in the big outdoors that makes even failure seem like a good day.

Howard Frank Mosher did not write a fish story. Well, not really. But it felt like one. He gives us long, lazy, drawling storytelling as he rolls from one state to another on his cross-country book tour. You might say he was casting a line in all those independents he visited: some holes were dry and some were hopping. In bookstore readings with an author we get perhaps an hour of the author’s time, giving a reading, telling anecdotes. In The Great Northern Express we have hours of stories, the best ones, about what it is like to live in a mill town in far north New England, to be an author, to travel the country flogging one’s wares in a vehicle so ragged that every mile gained is both a prayer and a miracle.

We learn of the man and his life, his influences, his decisions, his joys and cankers. And we get some of the best yankee backcountry jawing around. More than once, he reminded me of the classic book Go With Me by Castle Freeman about northeastern Yankees sitting around an abandoned chair factory for fun.

I’m glad Mosher took his long-promised trip, but I wish he’d had more time for fishing.

[Tanya Sousa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Howard Mosher's books have never been "usual", and that's something I like about them. This one is the first "memoir" of his I've read though, and for some reason I thought it would be more, well, "typical". Nope! It was in fine Howard Mosher style! It was funny and touching and frolicked along in the same way that life does - you don't quite know where it's leading you, but you are glad you're on the ride. He manages to bring you along in this seemingly haphazard way, and then pulls it together masterfully at the end.

It's a comedy, a history, a myth, and a love story on many levels. Well done, Howard Frank Mosher!

[Richard Becker · Rating 4 out of 5]

This story of a writer's book tour across the country in support of his latest novel is much more than that. It tells the tale of his trip, of course, including many quirky characters the author meets along the way. It also is the story of the author and his wife's first year as teachers in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, where he also wants to write novels. I laughed out loud at some of the things that happened to Mosher in that year and the people he met then. They later populated his fiction about that area of Vermont.

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Frank Mosher is a great guy to spend a few hundred pages with. I laughed aloud. For me the book is similar to Pat Conroy's "My Reading Life" in terms of narrative voice. The writer wholeheartedly embraces his own weirdness.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

A solid book, though I preferred the alternating chapters of his current-day road trip (book tour) to the flashbacks of his time as a rookie teacher in rural Vermont (c. 1964). If that would be your thing, then it gets another star.

[Cecelia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hmm. I sort of liked it.( Immediate digression: I made a round the country tour of 10,000 miles and several months camping while cheap-eating, searching for morning coffee places, accompanied by my dog. This was in 2011 under the guise of returning the artworks from artists throughout the USA who were part of a collaborative art project I organized addressing the second Iraq War.) So, I had a comparative outlook as I read. At first the going was boring; maybe a bit like reading a high school autobiography but from the viewpoint of a noted author seeking a framework for many short stories. After a few chapters I dropped my conceit and relaxed into the string of humorous outsider view-pointed tales of the characters the author, Howard Frank Mosher and his wife Phillis encountered in the late 1960's as new residents and high school teachers in Orleans near the Canada border in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Mosher's solo trek around the USA in the Loser Cruiser on a promotional book tour is the heart and soul of this collection. The trip is a nostalgic and humorous string of encounters with the mostly well-meaning underside of America struggling to make do in hard times. Mosher divides the novel into the categories of Faith Hope and Love, Love being the cluster of final tales that made ME love touring with him. Like Joseph Campbell's study of "The Hero's Journey", this hero-author, takes on the road in a dubious 4-wheeled boat that shimmies at speeds over 58 mph, and comes out the other side a better person who succeeds in promoting his novels, learning again that he loves his wife and that he misses his new-found community of hard working, resilient, salt of the earth farmers, factory workers, hunters and old fashioned ornery citizens who are there for each other no matter what.

[Shirley Albright · Rating 3 out of 5]

Purchased this book in a Vermont independent book store. Coincidentally, this book is about an author's book tour across the United States to similar spots. Each chapter could be read as its own short story but read altogether the author shares some personal adventures and reveals more about himself than the characters he writes about. The very last chapter is the big reveal - and it takes place close to my home near an independent book store known as The Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, a place I've grown to love and respect (next to its sister store, Marketblock Books in Troy, NY). Can't say this was the best book I've ever read, and there were times when the narrative had me wondering if the writer was zoning out on something....but I have to give him credit for completing not only his book tour, but providing more than a few chuckles along the way.

[Catherine Symchych · Rating 3 out of 5]

There was a quote in something I read fairly recently about authors playing fast and loose with the truth. Well, that fits here! I don’t mind that so much in fiction, but sure don’t expect or enjoy it in a memoir. And besides the parade of characters that join him on the road, there are travel details that are off. He drives along Route 90 (should be 80) from Evander (should be Evanston), and eventually ends up in Laramie. Second Story Books is real, and a great bookstore. How did he miss the opportunity to talk about the building’s past as a brothel? Did he change the name of the interstate and town to protect their privacy? Now I can’t take anything he says for truth, and the concept of a memoir is destroyed.

[Henry · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a surprising treat this turned out to be. Howard Mosher, after discovering and being irradiated for prostate cancer ventures out on a solo book tour of the remnant of independent books stores of America. Along the route he is joined by a variety of companions, most notably West Texas Jesus.

We vicariously travel along with Howard meeting a cadre of friends, family, students, rednecks, and drunkards all introduced with avuncular charm. Respectful and never patronizing his stories give us glimpses of an era bygone and the larger than life characters that inhabited the time. Surely Mr Mosher is one of them.

[Linda Spear · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've enjoyed Mosher's novels but this title was ABOUT him and what he considered to be his last book tour. Traveling to both small towns and large cities in the U.S., visiting libraries and bookstores in a seemingly helter-skelter manner, Mosher managed to keep his humor and sanity. This read like a travelogue but was really a memoir, giving the reader glances into his personal relationships as well as the places he went and the people he sometimes barely tolerated. I chuckled a lot.

[Rochelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really loved this book much more than I expected. The back and forth between the author's current book tour/road-trip and he and his wife's first year of teaching in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom in 1964 provided great balance and humor. The stories were hilarious, the real-life characters exactly what you might expect. Just a bit of light reading in a time when I needed an escape from reality.

[Jane M Simonson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Delightful

Just started in, reading away, come to find out, towards the very end, this lovely book is written by the author of one of my all time favorite books ever, Disappearances. Makes you just love reading, doesn't it?

[Linda Potter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wish I had discovered Howard Frank Mosher earlier. This memoir had me laughing out loud, something we all need these days. He is delightful, insightful and intelligent. Looking forward to reading all his books.

[Jeff Morris · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are the times you need a book like this.

Just a real nice book to pull your mind into a time and place long ago. No thick plot or suspense. Simply a soft story to put your mind at ease.

[Sheila Arel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first book I read of Mosher that got me hooked on his writing

[John Mulholland · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mosher has the ability to write about life that the reader can connect to. I have enjoyed all of his books

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun book about an author’s cross-country book tour. This story is interspersed with the story of how the author and his wife moved to Vermont’s “Kingdom County” and their first year there.

[David Freiman · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a kook. A look inside rural Vermont and also a “character” who stumbles through the US on his book tour.

[Thomas Holbrook · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book promised: 1) an account of a road trip, 2) visit(s) to various, independent booksellers across the country, 3) a journey that leads “home.” This was the first book by Mr. Mosher, a.k.a. “Frank Who,” I have read so his humorous telling of his trek was a bonus.
When Howard Frank Mosher was 65, he applied for a McArthur Grant, which would pay him to “practice his art,” however he saw fit, for a year. His “McArthur Grant,” came in the form of a Cancer diagnosis. He took the moment of clarity offered by such a shock to decide he would fulfill a fifty-year-old promise – to visit the “haunts” of the authors of he and his favored Uncle Reg loved to read. He makes this 100 city, 20,000 mile odyssey, in a 20-year-old Chevy Celebrity he has named “the Loser Cruiser;” his traveling companions are: Uncle Reg (beloved uncle and dead 15 years), various authors (also deceased) and the “West Texas Jesus.” All of these “companions” offer direction, suggestions and generally play “Jiminy Cricket” to Mr. Mosher’s “Pinocchio.”
In planning his itinerary, Mr. Mosher could have used a better GPS or at least consulted a map. He frequently back tracks, travels a few miles between book signings (the incentive for this tour is the promotion of his latest book) then drives extreme distances in a day (like from Miami to Texas). The book relates the story “as the tour happens” interspersed with the details of his move to Orleans, Kingdom County, Vermont in the early 1960’s. While entertaining, why the details of this recalling are included in this travelogue are unclear.
The author quotes Larry McMurtry at points and the book is largely derivative of Mr. McMurtry’s Roads. Where Roads is a book detailing a road trip for the sake of “seeing where the road goes,” this book has much less focus. Apart from the imaginary riders, Mr. Mosher speaks of some bizarre occurrences he experienced while on his trip. I am not sure if those events were fiction meant to highlight the unusual trip he was on, if they were indicative of a more profound mental issue (possibly from the 44 radiation treatments he received to treat his cancer) with which he has come to accept or if they were actual events.
The book was fun, but it is not one that will be the top of any “must read” lists.

[Barbara Mitchell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Howard Frank Mosher's account of his life as recalled during a cross-country book tour in a 20 year old car he calls the "Loser Cruiser" is guaranteed to make you laugh. I received it through Amazon Vine; it went on sale March 6, 2012.

After a diagnosis and treatment for prostate cancer and his 65th birthday, Mosher decides to head out to independent bookstores all over the country to promote his new book. His beloved wife stays home so he imagines passengers to keep him company. It's his habit to talk to imaginary people even as he's walking down the street at home anyway so this is nothing new.

Home is northeastern Vermont, a place he describes so funny you'll hold your sides laughing. He and his wife moved there directly after Syracuse University to be teachers, and the school superintendent there judges days by whether they require two or three quarts of beer to get him through. The new teachers are told that their primary mission is to keep the kids out of the mill, i.e. a furniture factory in town.

This memoir sort of reminds me of William Least Heat Moon's travel memoirs, except that Mosher's trip is so much more hilarious. He stays in Motel 6 or a local dive, refusing to stay anywhere more upscale, and he meets the strangest people. However, this is also an homage to the surviving independent bookstores in this country. All readers, I'm sure, are aware that indies are becoming nearly extinct, but some of the ones still open are becoming quite famous. You'll recognize a few.

This author is so wacky it took me a little bit to decide if I liked the book but then it grew on me and I just drove my husband crazy reading sections to him from then on. By the way, the author and his car both survive to get back to Mrs. Mosher.

[Mary's Bookshelf · Rating 3 out of 5]

Part travelogue, part memoir, "The Great Northern Express" doesn't quite satisfy either category. After undergoing radiation treatment for prostate cancer, Howard Frank Mosher decided to go on a lengthy author-road trip from Vermont to California and back. His mode of transportation was a 20-year-old Chevy Celebrity that he names the Loser Cruiser. With over a hundred independent bookstores on the agenda, he comments about the countryside, strange characters, and the state of bookstores in this country.
Interspersed with this commentary are stories about his first year of teaching high school in northern Vermont in the mid-60's. He tells tales about the characters inhabiting the backwoods and the small towns. These people and their lives became the inspiration for his many novels set in the Northern Kingdom. Mosher discusses the writers who were role models for him--Hemingway, Twain, Faulkner and many local writers.
The problem is that these alternating stories do not really mesh. We do not learn enough about his past to understand how he became a successful regional writer. His comments about various bookstores are so brief that they could be deleted without changing the book much. The chapters are short enough to be in a Dan Brown book. And a magical-realism Jesus who rides along with him is just a painful device.
I have enjoyed Mosher's fiction and recommend that readers stick with that rather than this lame memoir.

[John Benson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The 1st book that I read by Howard Frank Mosher was a travelogue. He wrote in NORTHERN BORDERS about a trip he took along the US/Canadian border as he turned 50. Since I read that book, I have read all of Howard Frank Mosher's novels. Now with this book, fifteen years later, I have returned to read another travelogue as he turned 65, experienced prostrate cancer and decides to go on a book tour visiting independent book stores through out the US and selling one of his novels (He never says which one). In between chapters on his road trip, he tells of his first year as a teacher and writer in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont where most of his novels are set. In 65 short chapters, he brings out his road trip and the story of that first year that led him to stay put in that area for the rest of his adult life. I liked almost all of it but he has one imaginary character on his road trip that I could never understand how he showed up and who he was--West Texas Jesus. Other than that, I really enjoyed the book.