In this wide-ranging and sophisticated study, Rowland Sherrill explores the resurgence and transformation of an old literary form - the picaresque narrative - into a new form that he shows to be both responsive and instructive to late twentieth-century American life. Road-Book America discloses how the old picaresque tradition, embodied in such novels as Henry Fielding's Tom Jones and Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, opens to include a number of new American texts, both fiction and nonfiction, that decisively share the characterizing form. Sherrill's discussion encompasses hundreds of American...