By Motor to the Golden Gate

In 1915, Emily Post was not yet the empress of etiquette. She was a 42-year-old journalist with a son at Harvard and a restless curiosity about whether a comfortable cross-country automobile trip was actually possible. This book is the account of that journey, and it is nothing like the stiff protocol manuals that would later make her famous. Instead, it is alive with the bouncy humor of a woman who has never changed a tire, the sharp eye of someone accustomed to observing social worlds, and the genuine wonder of motoring through an America that no longer exists. From Niagara Falls to cave dwellings near Santa Fe, Post records the prices of everything, the condition of the roads, the strange beauty of a continent still figuring out how to be traversed. She is insufferably upper-class and endlessly entertaining about it. Reading this book feels like finding a grandmother's secret diary, except the grandmother happened to be documenting the birth of the American road trip.