Hoosier Holiday

'"A Hoosier Holiday" is perhaps Dreiser's most accessible book, philosophical in parts and pessimistic in outlook, yet steeped in the sights, sounds, and talk of the Middle West and leavened by his rather ponderous humor' - Richard Lingeman, Dreiser biographer. '...a trip into the heart of America, a matter upon which like all too many road warriors of future generations he was quick to pronounce oracular judgment' - Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post.By 1914, Theodore Dreiser was a successful writer living in New York. He had not been back to his home state in over 20 years. When his friend, the Indiana-born artist Franklin Booth approached him with the idea of driving from New York to Indiana, Dreiser's response to Booth was immediate: 'All my life I've been thinking of making a return trip to Indiana and writing a book about it.' So was born the literary genre - the American automobile road book. Along the route, Dreiser recorded his impressions of the people and land in words while his traveling companion sketched some of these scenes. In this reflective tale, Dreiser and Booth cross four states, covering 2000 miles in two weeks, to arrive at Indiana and the sites and memories of Dreiser's early life in Terre Haute, Sullivan, Evansville, Warsaw, and his year at Indiana University.