Across America by Motor-Cycle

A British veteran, restless after the Great War, purchases a powerful motorbike in New York and sets off across a continent he once helped save. This is his account of riding from ocean to ocean, through the raw young cities and vast landscapes of 1920s America. C. K. Shepherd writes with the wry detachment of an outsider and the intimate curiosity of someone who has seen too much to take anything for granted. He navigates chaotic Manhattan traffic, marvels at American diners and gas stations, and wrestles with machinery that breaks down in the most inconvenient places. He meets ranchers, hustlers, drifters, and kind strangers. He reflects on a nation still processing its own industrial trauma, its optimism punctuated by the wreckage left behind. The book captures America at a peculiar inflection point: the old rural heartland meeting the new automotive age, small towns still connected by dirt roads, the Pacific coast beckoning like a finish line. For readers who love vintage travel writing, early motorcycling history, or the American road as a literary subject, this is a small masterpiece of wit and wandering.