Three Kinds of Motion: Kerouac, Pollock, and the Making of American Highways

Description

A freewheeling journey through midcentury America as art, literature, and the interstate highway system intersect. In 1943, Peggy Guggenheim commissioned a mural from Jackson Pollock to hang in the entryway of her Manhattan townhouse. It was the largest Pollock canvas she would ever own, and four years later she gave it to a small Midwestern institution with no place to put it. When the original scroll of On the Road goes on tour across the country, it lands at the same Iowa museum housing Peggy's Pollock—revitalizing Riley Hanick's adolescent fascination with the author. Alongside these two narrative threads, Hanick revisits Dwight D. Eisenhower's quest to build America's first interstate highway system. When catastrophic rains flood the Iowa highways, they also threaten the museum and its precious mural. In Three Kinds of Motion, his razor-sharp, funny, and intensely vulnerable book-length essay, Hanick moves deftly between his three subjects, and delivers a story with breathtaking ingenuity. "He gravitates toward the unexpected and the poignant. We see Eisenhower painting, Kerouac confined to a naval hospital after running naked across a drill field, and Pollock babysitting for the offspring of his mentor, Thomas Hart Benton. Hanick [creates] arresting juxtapositions in the mode of such kindred innovative essayists as John D'Agata, Ander Monson, and Lia Purpura." —Booklist "Like a great conversationalist, Hanick paints a generous canvas, and I rode the length of this powerful book much like I first experienced the American interstate: songs on the stereo, windows down, and the bittersweet sense that youth is fleeting. Three Kinds of Motion holds open a wild and beautiful journey, not to be missed." —Thalia Field