U. S. 40: Cross Section of the United States of America

by George R. Stewart

Dust Cover. Ex Library book. Spine is separated from the book. Book is worn & has stains.

Genres: History, Travel, Nonfiction, American History, Transport

311 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1953

About the author

George Rippey Stewart was an American toponymist, a novelist, and a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is best known for his only science fiction novel Earth Abides (1949), a post-apocalyptic novel, for which he won the first International Fantasy Award in 1951. It was dramatized on radio's Escape and inspired Stephen King's The Stand .

His 1941 novel Storm , featuring as its protagonist a Pacific storm called Maria, prompted the National Weather Service to use personal names to designate storms and inspired Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe to write the song "They Call the Wind Maria" for their 1951 musical "Paint Your Wagon." Storm was dramatized as "A Storm Called Maria" on a 1959 episode of ABC's Disneyland. Two other novels, Ordeal by Hunger (1936) and Fire (1948) also evoked environmental catastrophes.

Stewart was a founding member of the American Name Society in 1956-57, and he once served as an expert witness in a murder trial as a specialist in family names. His best-known academic work is Names on the Land A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States (1945; reprinted, New York Review Books, 2008). He wrote three other books on place-names, A Concise Dictionary of American Place-Names (1970), Names on the Globe (1975), and American Given Names (1979). His scholarly works on the poetic meter of ballads (published under the name George R. Stewart, Jr.), beginning with his 1922 Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia, remain important in their field.

His 1959 book Pickett's Charge is a detailed history of the final attack at Gettysburg.

Reviews

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book changed my life. It entered my house in 1953 when I was six years old. I grew up just a few miles from US 40 and traveled that road regularly to Baltimore as a passenger (unseatbelted) in our Willys Jeep Wagon (a woodie) at speeds up to an astonishing 50mph, at which point the engine made a screech like a tortured feline. Sometime in the late 1950s after reading On the Road, I was whammied by the one-two punch of puberty and wanderlust. And I read Stewart's US 40 over and over. Here was escape. Here was America. Here was the road that stitched an entire continent from Atlantic City all the way to San Francisco following roughly the fortieth parallel extending roughly the Mason-Dixon Line -- the divide, the center, the balance point of the USA. I'd never been west of Harper's Ferry. I didn't want to be a beatnik. I just wanted to hitchhike that highway and see this wide land in grubby gritty glory. The small towns of Ohio. The vendor of watermelons asleep in his wheelchair. The grainfields of Kansas. The sheepherder in Colorado. Beaver dams. The basin and range of Nevada. Donner Pass and its chilling history. Holy moly.

The maps by Erwin Raisz, probably America's greatest mapmaker, are worth the price of the book. The 92 photos seem plain and amateurish at first glance, but then you read Stewart's analysis and learn the history, the architecture, the natural events of weather and landscape, geology, highway engineering, just an amazing amount of knowledge. From this book I learned how to see, how to inhabit, how to smell, taste, chew, swallow, and digest a photo -- not as art but as a volume of information.

Now I live near the opposite end of US 40. Maybe it's because of this book. Or maybe it would've happened anyway. Today, a new reader would probably view the photos as a time capsule of the 1950s, of passing interest. The paperback reproduction available today probably doesn't do justice to the original 1953 hardback. But oh man. Those photos, that text, those richly-drawn maps, they changed my life.

[Dave E · Rating 4 out of 5]

I imagine many people would find this book dry, but for me I found it quite interesting. Written in the early 1950s, the book covered a cross section of America in the era before interstates. Beginning in the east, and heading west, the author considered every stretch of highway along the cross country route of U.S. 40, using photographs as a basis for short 1 to 2 page discussions. Throughout the book he touched on a wide variety of subjects, including highway engineering, history, geology, geography, meteorology, climate, architecture and I am sure a number of other subjects I am forgetting to mention. All in all, it was an enjoyable and informative peek into America's mid 20th century past.

[Peter Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good read about Americana. The book is very outdated in both author’s choice of language and also the fact that US 40 has been severely truncated, but the spirit and purpose of writing is inspiring. People nowadays just hop on an interstate and look to get from A to B with laser focus on the destination. I wish we’d all just slow down and enjoy the journey like George did, and see the good and bad that come with this great nation.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was written a couple of years after I was born. Interesting to look at America at that time. How much has changed in the transportation industry and looking at the countryside and cities at that time

[Steven Yenzer · Rating 4 out of 5]

George R. Stewart is just the best. His curiosity about things most people would consider mundane — like highways, place names, and geology — is infectious, and his writing is lively and fun.

[Terry · Rating 5 out of 5]

"By whatever name it may be called," Stewart writes in "A Few Reflections" at the close of this marvelous history, "U.S. 40 will develop and amplify." By whatever name. That's something of the story in itself. It's not U.S. 40 anymore. Hardly made it to the publication of this book in 1953 before it was renamed in 1956, at least the parts of it that were subsumed into I80 just as parts of other highways and byways had been subsumed under the nomenclature U.S. 40 for almost 50 years.
Though there are other names in the tale, of the progenitors of this section or that, they are not the names of the architects of the cement or asphalt swaths that stretch across the land and leap across the rivers, the chasms, the gorges.
I think it is safe to say that in this Road, Stewart saw, and wrote about, his vision of the American spirit.

[TrumanCoyote · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unfortunately, the author is an awful pomposaur, and the tedium of all his historical asides and backgrounds tends to weigh the whole project down. It was at any rate interesting to see what crossing This Great Land Of Ours looked like circa 1950--and one of the most touching aspects of all was that picture of the end of the line (at that street corner in San Francisco)...although even there George had to jaw it up a bit and wax philosophical. It was kind of like going cross-country with a boring history professor droning on the whole time in the back seat. Also, his relentless harping upon Unsightly Billboards grew old very very quickly indeed.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very hard to find, but a very interesting book. I tracked down a first printing, and I'm glad I did. It is a fine example of "little history" and a great trip back in time.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent time capsule of the early 1950s. Interesting and well written.