Books like America and Americans, and selected nonfiction by John Steinbeck

Robert M. Pirsig’s classic blends a true‑to‑life motorcycle trip with a deep meditation on self‑discovery and philosophy, exploring how we live and how we might live better.

The Grapes of Wrath follows a family of Oklahoma sharecroppers who leave their land during the Great Depression, journey to California, and confront the harsh realities of labor camps, low wages, and the struggle for dignity on the open range.

John Steinbeck journeys across the United States with his French poodle Charley, exploring the country’s sights, sounds, and people in a candid travelogue that reflects on American life and identity.

What does it mean to be an American, and what can America be today? To answer these questions, celebrated philosopher and journalist Bernard-Henri Lévy spent a year travelling throughout the country in the footsteps of another great Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America remains the most influential book ever written about this country.

John M. Synge’s six‑week visits to the Aran Islands in the late 1890s, recommended by Yeats, profoundly shaped his writing and led to the plays for which he is best remembered.

Frances Trollope’s 1839 account offers a witty, social‑critique travelogue of early American life, blending personal observation with cultural commentary.

Prologue: Thoughts on a frozen pond -- The view from point sublime -- Provenance notes -- Alien land ethic : the distance between -- Madeline tracing -- What's in a name -- Properties of desire -- Migrating in a bordered land -- Placing Washington, DC, after the Inauguration -- Epilogue: At Crowsnest Pass "Sand and stone are Earth's fragmented memory. Each of us, too, is a landscape inscribed by memory and loss. One life-defining lesson Lauret Savoy learned as a young girl was this: the American land did not hate. As an educator and Earth historian, she has tracked the continent's past from the relics of deep time; but the paths of ancestors toward her--paths of free and enslaved Africans, colonists from Europe, and peoples indigenous to this land--lie largely eroded and lost. In this provocative and powerful mosaic of personal journeys and historical inquiry across a continent and time, Savoy explores how the country's still unfolding history, and ideas of 'race, ' have marked her and the land. From twisted terrain within the San Andreas Fault zone to a South Carolina plantation, from national parks to burial grounds, from 'Indian Territory' and the U.S.-Mexico Border to the U.S. capital, Trace grapples with a searing national history to reveal the often unvoiced presence of the past. In distinctive and illuminating prose that is attentive to the rhythms of language and landscapes, she weaves together human stories of migration, silence, and displacement, as epic as the continent they survey, with uplifted mountains, braided streams, and eroded canyons"