On the Road.

In the summer of 1935 a gangling, fourteen-year-old Arkansas farm boy named Lee Webster hiked twenty miles from his home in Landis to the nearest paved highway, caught a ride, and went looking for work. Over the next six years Webster — this writer's grandfather — threshed wheat in Kansas; worked in a carnival in Nebraska; harvested corn in Minnesota; gambled in Kansas City; trucked melons in Missouri, stave bolts in Illinois, and lettuce in Colorado; surveyed the Wisconsin woods with the Civilian Conservation Corps; married; divorced; joined the U.S. Army Air Corps; and arrived in Hawaii just in time for the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. His restlessness and wandering were typical: millions of Americans, both men and women, hopped freight trains and hitched rides just about anywhere trying to make ends meet during the Depression. No single locale defined America in...