The Lincoln Highway

Nebraska, June 1954. Eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson returns from a juvenile work farm after serving fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His father is dead, the family farm has been foreclosed and Emmett intends to take his eight-year-old brother Billy west to California for a fresh start. The plan changes when Duchess and Woolly, two boys from the work farm, emerge from the warden’s car and take Emmett’s Studebaker east towards New York, each pursuing an unfinished personal mission.

Told over ten days from several viewpoints, the journey moves through freight yards, roadside towns, homeless camps and the wealthy streets of Manhattan. Emmett and Billy’s attempt to recover the car becomes entangled with Duchess’s private reckoning and Woolly’s longing for home, while the boys repeatedly encounter adults living outside the confident prosperity associated with post-war America. The novel combines a road adventure with a coming-of-age story about justice, friendship, storytelling and the competing routes by which young people imagine a different future.