Books like Vagabonding in America by Ed Buryn

A nonfiction novel chronicling the adventures of a group of friends on their cross-country journey of discovery, featuring characters like Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty as real-life friends Neal Casady.

After graduating college, journalist Jon Krakauer traces the true story of Christopher McCandless, a young adventurer who abandoned possessions, took the name Alexander Supertramp, and ventured into Alaska’s wilderness, where he met his untimely death.

Bill Bryson humorously chronicles a two–person hike along the Appalachian Trail, mixing lively anecdotes with insightful looks at its history, ecology, and the people who live along the route.

Soul of a People is about a handful of people who were on the Federal Writer's Project in the 1930s and a glimpse of America at a turning point. This particular handful of characters went from poverty to great things later, and included John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Studs Terkel. In the 1930s they were all caught up in an effort to describe America in a series of WPA guides. Through striking images and firsthand accounts, the book reveals their experiences and the most vivid excerpts from selected guides and interviews: Harlem schoolchildren, truckers, Chicago fishmongers, Cuban cigar makers, a Florida midwife, Nebraskan meatpackers, and blind musicians. Drawing on new discoveries from personal collections, archives, and recent biographies, a new picture has emerged in the last decade of how the participants' individual dramas intersected with the larger picture of their subjects. This book illuminates what it felt like to live that experience, how going from joblessness to reporting on their own communities affected artists with varied visions, as well as what feelings such a passage involved: shame humiliation, anger, excitement, nostalgia, and adventure. Also revealed is how the WPA writers anticipated, and perhaps paved the way for, the political movements of the following decades, including the Civil Rights movement, the Women's Right movement, and the Native American rights movement.

Because their best-selling *Weird U.S.* couldn't possibly contain all the roadside oddities, local heroes, villains, cursed roads, creepy legends, and abandoned places this strange land of ours has to offer, Mark and Mark, along with Matt, are back—proving that the U.S. is weirder than ever! Enlisting their many resources and kindred spirits from sea to shining sea—and everywhere in between—to bring forth the best, scariest, and most bizarre people, places, and things this country has to offer, the Weird team has once again out-weirded themselves. For example, how about a university cafeteria that is not only named after a cannibal, but also has an honorary bust of him! And that's just one of the many strange and wonderful stories *Weird U.S.: The ODDyssey Continues* has to offer. Take a trip and discover the theme park without a theme; visit the two most psychic towns in America (they already know you're on your way); drop by the Museum of Swallowed Objects; meet a real-life ambassador to not one but seven different alien races, whose inspirational book was co-authored by one of his constituents. There's even a handy list of all kinds of events and festivals happening throughout the year that makes your wildest hometown fair look very, very normal. How do you get to the true utopian land of Zzyzx if you don't even know how to say it? Why is there an ever escalating war about which state has the biggest ball of twine? What, or who, is the Hollow Earth Society, and how many mystery spots are really located in this country? The answers to these questions, and many, many more, are all inside this here tome to the ODD. Read on. It's a journey you'll never forget.