So Duchess steals Emmett’s car, along with everything Emmett had in his possession and had packed into the trunk of the car. The home of Emmett and Billy Watson is marked on the map with a star.īut just when they start their trip, Duchess and Woolly pitch up, having escaped from prison, and they don’t want to go to California, they want to go to New York City – in the opposite direction.

Map of the Lincoln Transcontinental Highway from The Lincoln Highway, by Amor Towles. It was eventually replaced by the numbered interstate highway system, primarily the Interstate 80 coast-to-coast route. The real Lincoln Highway, initiated in 1916, was the first road built for automobiles in the US, and stretched across the United States, from New York City to San Francisco. He wants to build a new life for him and Billy in California, fixing up and reselling houses. Emmett wants to pay his bills, load what they have left into their car, an old Studebaker, and drive the Lincoln Highway to East to California – since Nebraska is sort of in the middle of the country. His only remaining family is his young brother, Billy, who has been in Sally Ransom’s care.

The farm has been foreclosed on by the bank, his father has died. The story takes place in June 1954, when Emmett arrives back at his family’s farm in Nebraska. Some chapters are narrated by secondary characters such as “Sally Ransom”, the likeable, feisty daughter of a neighbour. The four main characters are 18-year-old “Emmett Watson”, fresh out of prison for involuntary manslaughter his 8-year-old brother, “Billy Watson” a friend of Emmett’s from his time in prison, called “Duchess” (named after a place, not a title) and Duchess’s friend and hanger-on, “Woolly”.

The explains why it is that the novel is so long, while the story takes place over only a ten-day period.įurthermore, what makes it more different and complicated is that every chapter, in each part, is told from the perspective of a different character. Every moment, every conversation between the characters, their every thought, are described in detail, as if one were not reading a story but looking at a map that is slowly being rolled out – places, names, numbers, incidents all precisely tied together, minute by minute, stops marked with a star or an X. In The Lincoln Highway, Towles writes in that same style: precise, clear, and elegant, with words chosen to suit the period in which the novel is set. The Lincoln Highway, by Amor Towles (Publisher: ‎Viking Oct.

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