The Story behind the Great American Novel Project

(December 17th, 2021. I had been at home for a month struggling with Long Covid, and was feeling pretty trapped again. I was dead broke and not sure how to get funding to continue my adventure. I learned that a friend of mine, Jasmine Wang, had gotten a Thiel Fellowship for writing; prior to this, I had thought the Thiel was only for tech people. The Thiel Fellowship offers $100,000 to students working on cool projects to incentivize them to drop out of school and pursue their project full time. Well, I figured, I had already done that; I’d dropped out over two years ago to pursue the Great American Novel project, and by far the biggest constraint keeping me from making better progress on it was my lack of finances. I had spent the whole first year working to make the money for the bus, despite the fact that it slowed my progress and dampened my spirits, and now I was broke again. I don’t want to have to work on other things if I can help it. The Thiel Fellowship accepts rolling applications, but you have to be 22 or under to apply. My 23rd birthday was December 18th. I planned on spending the whole day of the 17th writing my application; I knew that, once it was submitted, I could keep adding to the application, primarily by updating my website with all my work (this website, which I began adding to that day!) But I had to get it in before I was 23. However, my plans for working all day on the application were stymied, because that day my precious puppy Waldo broke his leash and ran straight into a car in Cambridge. He ran away from the scene terrified, and I spent two awful hours running around the Charles River looking for him. Eventually I found him, hurt and scared, and I brought him to the animal hospital. Around 6 pm, the doctor said he would be okay, gave me some medicine for him, and sent us home. So, the day was shot. Undeterred, I took an Adderall, and spent 8 pm- midnight writing this summary of my story and my project, the Great American Novel project. Is it the best thing I’ve written? No. Is it grandiose and self-aggrandizing? Yes. Does it smell a bit desperate, given where my life was at when I wrote it? Sure. But did I submit it on time, leaving me eligible to receive a Thiel Fellowship in the upcoming year? Absolutely. While I know the Thiel is a long shot, it would change my life, and I think I have a chance. After all, I have such a deep conviction in my own project, and I know that conviction shines through. Of course, over the next few months I would like to apply to other funding sources as well, to maximize my chances of continuing this project. Worst case, if I don’t get serious funding, I can just go back to Harvard and finish my senior year, since at least then I’ll have a year of room and board all paid for by financial aid. But I wanna keep doing this; I wanna keep living my beautiful dirtbag adventurer life in my amazing school bus home, and write full time. If you are a rich person, or know a rich person, send them this essay! And have them peruse my website. To be the person who enables the Great American Novel, and the cultural reform movement this project implies, is a unique way to impact the world. I am doing this anyway, regardless of how much help I get, but God knows it’ll go faster if I have help, and I think time is of the essence. Soon, I will have my essays ‘On the Need for Democratic Literature’ and ‘The Nation is a Fiction’ up on this site, and they, too, will function as a sort of pitch for why it is important that I work on this project, and why it is worth funding. But for now, this will do for my pitch. So here it is, in all its roughness and honesty: my story, and the dream of the Great American Novel.)

My life project is the Great American Novel. While the flexibility of humanity’s meaning-making power allows me to retrofit my entire life into the context of the Great American Novel, I first became conscious of this project during my freshman year at Harvard. I arrived at Harvard as an idealistic 17 year old; I was accepted at 16 from my small working-class public school; it was the culmination of a moonshot dream to escape my hometown and my traumatic home life. I wanted to change the world, and thought Harvard was my chance to do so. But when I arrived, I was quickly disillusioned by Harvard and our educational institutions in general. I thought Harvard would be filled with brilliant iconoclastic minds desiring to creatively and collaboratively change the world; instead, I found the majority of my peers were uninspired rich kids who were well-raised system-followers, smart but not brilliant, good at playing games and desirous of filling in roles within larger systems that had clearly failed in many ways. These kids did not want to change everything; they wanted a good job at Goldman or McKinsey. When Trump was elected my freshman fall, it became clear that there was a deep rot in our elite institutions, politics, and culture; furthermore, it was clear that the future heirs to these systems were not prepared for the radical efforts necessary to fix the many problems our society faces. I decided that the world needed heroes to do crazy things, and that minds merely molded by our broken systems would never be sufficient to the crisis. I had to go beyond these systems, mold my own mind, and resist the forces that wanted to make me a willing cog in a broken machine. 

When I was 18, my freshman spring, I read On The Road by Jack Kerouac for the first time, which caused me to realize two things: one, that self-directed reading was the best way I knew to develop my own power and freedom, and two, that hitchhiking was once a normal way to explore America. I had never really left New England, because my dad’s alcoholism made family travel difficult. The election of Trump taught me that I needed to discover America in all its plurality for myself. I hatched a crazy plan to hitchhike around America. I researched hitchhiking, and found its decline after the 70s to be representative of the late 20th century breakdown of the American social fabric. The fear and stigma that the adults in my life felt toward hitchhiking seemed representative of larger negative shifts in American social consciousness post-Watergate, and especially post-Reagan. It seemed ridiculous to me, given low crime rates and the power of smartphones, that hitchhiking was so taboo in the 21st century. How can you have a democracy when everyone thinks that strangers are scary murderers? It didn’t seem right to me; it was once possible, and it should still be possible to rely on strangers. The more I thought about it, the more I thought I could really do it, and the more I believed that I wanted to live in the kind of world where anyone could do it, a world of community and adventure and faith and experimentation. I wanted to bet on my life that people are inherently good, that all the scary stories hid the truth, the truth that people are worth trusting. I saved up $1000 working at a local burrito joint, and, in the summer of 2017, I set off on an epic two month adventure around the entire United States, covering a distance of over 8000 miles and involving hundreds of interesting conversations with different drivers.

The goal was to experience as much of ‘America’ as possible in as little time and money as possible. I rode with truck drivers and everyday people; I listened to stories of all kinds; I hiked the Appalachian Trail, the Rockies, the desert, the Cascades; I explored major cities and small towns; I met hundreds of incredible people, kind people; I learned how to have productive philosophical dialogues with any person; I learned how to navigate the world as a ‘homeless’ person, and I did not reveal that I was a Harvard student. Since I was a little kid, I considered myself a philosopher, but hitchhiking taught me that true philosophical exploration must be done as much in the real world as in books. To read Plato is one thing, to enter Socratic dialogue with a Fox-loving truck driver is another; to read Emerson is one thing, to be alone in the rain in Shenandoah is another; to read political philosophy is one thing, to ride across the Sonoran desert in the back of a Mexican family’s pickup truck is another. I had enough amazing adventures in that one trip to write a Great American Novel, but I realized that I didn’t want to stop there. I could take the adventure further than anyone could have imagined. I wanted to keep living the Great American Novel.

I fell in love with hitchhiking that summer. I loved the adventure, the openness, the freedom, the trust, the connection; I loved that it put me in near-random dialogue with any possible kind of person, like an experience machine; I loved the way it taught me to rethink the relationships between the individual and society, the relationships between the mind and nature, the relationships between the body and language. I realized I wanted to keep doing that for as long as I could; I realized that America was far vaster than I had ever imagined, and that a whole lifetime could be spent exploring every beautiful place, every novel idea, every great work of culture, every kind of unique American. And that is exactly what I decided I wanted to do with my life. I have been doing it ever since.

‘America’ is a vast, expansive, inclusive noun; it is a finite, pursuable, everchanging goal that tends towards the infinite; it is the great white whale; in pursuing understanding of what ‘America’ is, I must speak with more Americans than anyone has before; I must explore more of the physical continent than anyone has before; I must read more about American history, philosophy, politics, literature, culture, art, thought, than anyone has before. And I have been doing this, monomaniacally, for the last five years. It is striking, the way that books are like drivers; they take you for a ride, pour their originality into you the way all environments do, and in so doing expand your self. I have been on many rides these last five years, and they are all going, eventually, to the same place: the Great American Novel, the lodestone of my life’s intellectual and physical adventures.

When I returned to Harvard for my sophomore year, I was a new person. My creative energy was unleashed; I was on fire after having lived as the ultimate experiential philosopher over the summer. From then on, I only took classes that excited me, with reading lists full of books I wanted to read for my own passion project. I no longer cared about social games or getting a good job or anything else like that; I gave up the Golden Ticket; I had a sense of destiny, and a burning desire to move towards it, however long it would take. I was happy, free, reading amazing philosophers, adopting new world-shifting ideas every week and living them; my life was an experiment with which I could test any idea; I was both actor and narrator; I was aware that I was living the Great American Novel, and it made my life feel rich and meaningful. I still feel this way. I lived like a hitchhiker at Harvard, and met many amazing people. I took weekend hitchhiking trips to western Mass, Vermont, upstate New York. I surrounded myself with increasingly awesome people, who only fueled my fire further. And I read like nobody else I knew. I declared Social Studies as my major, because Social Studies 10 was the grandest philosophy reading course at Harvard; I wanted to be a philosopher without being a philosophy major, since I figured if every philosopher was a philosophy major then they would all have the same blind spots. I took classes that fit, in any way, with my ever expanding project. My philosophical interests grew wider and wider, and I kept discovering ways that they connected to the grand idea of America. Philosophical problems of freedom, value, truth, novelty, morality, history, nature, political economy, individuality, sociality, the relationship between the individual and society, and more were all not just relevant, but essential.

In my spare time, I started reading my way through an ever-evolving and interconnecting web of the most important American works of thought. I’ve been reading my way through every great American novel, and I recognize that the ultimate Great American Novel must in some way reference or connect to or draw inspiration from every great American novel that has gone before. Out of many, one. In this way, my project feels, if not easy, then at least overtly possible, possibly inevitable; if one mind is able to collect every great American novel and more, and infuse it with the experience of an individual life, then the Great American Novel will naturally emerge from that with effort on the part of the believing individual. It feels as if it is out there already, merely waiting to be collected and actualized. This feeling, that I am working toward some latent possibility, gets stronger and stronger the more of the tradition I consume. My sense of destiny has only increased; I strongly believe that, if I simply continue along my path, that the Great American Novel will be the result. This feeling has only been strengthened by the many prophecies scattered throughout American cultural history; Emerson’s American Scholar essay, Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass Preface (where he describes what the “greatest poet” and the “American poet” must do), and Eliot’s essay The Tradition and the Individual Talent all hint about the possibility (and necessity) of a cultural figure one day emerging to syncretically put together what America is and could be. The prophecies are already there; they are canon; they are unfulfilled. Prophecies are powerful things; they create the conditions for their own fulfillment. It is truly a lovely thing to find a prophecy that you know you are capable of fulfilling.

Not only must I read all the best American novels; I have been absorbing the greatest American thoughts of all kinds, and will continue to do so for many years. I have a reading list hundreds of books deep, and even before reading them I increasingly know how they are all interrelated. There are deeply embedded threads connecting American thinkers through history; in recent decades, for structural reasons relating to the academy and to the media environment, these crucial threads have been lost from public consciousness; I will revive them. I embody American philosophers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, John Dewey; I embody American historians; I embody political heroes, cultural heroes, great social movements from the Social Gospel to the 60s hippies and beyond. The narrators and characters in the Great American Novel must be ‘representative’ of all of these and more, must put all the greatest American thoughts in dialectical relationship with one another in one place. ‘America’ is a synecdoche for the grand liberal dialogue of history; just as the ideal America is the open field in which every conceivable person, idea, or creation can come into creative/destructive dialogue with everything else, so too the Great American Novel. It is meta. The Great American Novel Project continually and dynamically expands just as ‘America’ can. And, just as anyone can conceivably be American, the great thinkers of Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and beyond are welcome in the Great American Novel. They have and will continue to provide much needed context.

Sophomore year was also when I discovered poetry; specifically, I discovered the most ideally American person who ever lived, Walt Whitman. Whitman is the greatest example yet of an artist attempting to embody the entirety of American idealism. Whitman himself knew he would spawn all American poets, and he speaks directly to his students; he even prophesied that one of his students would one day surpass him, and embraced this as necessary. I could talk about Whitman forever, but for now it is worth saying simply that he shows us how liberal democracy is something lived on an individual level; he presents a liberal democratic model of the self. Furthermore, by freeing poetry, he shows us how poetry can increase our own freedom. And most importantly for this project, he argues in his 1871 essay Democratic Vistas that a robust and original ‘democratic literature’ is essential to the functioning of a democracy. He argues, persuasively, that democracy does not work without it. The function of this literature is to give creative self-definition to the people, expose them to liberalizing forces and experiences, and inculcate in them the values necessary to be functioning and intelligent citizens in a liberal democracy. (Note: When I speak of ‘liberal democracy,’ I am not referring to any political system that has existed; I am referring to an ideal, to the pursuit of progress in the problem of human nature, the problem of the complex individual’s relationship to the complex society of which he is part; in sociobiological terms, to quote EO Wilson, this is the problem of imperfect eusociality. Liberal democracy is the dream of resolving the inherent tensions between individual level natural selection and group level natural selection.) Whitman believes that individuals need to personally believe in ideals in order for such a society to function; you can’t make such a society work with material progress alone; you need spiritual, moral, cultural, esthetic progress, and this requires democratic literature. He made many predictions in that essay about what might happen to America if its material progress continued to vastly outstrip its moral progress; it is shocking how many of his predictions came true. 

I believe that this stagnation in humanities progress happened due to many deeply flawed incentive structures; particularly in the last half-century, our structures of knowledge production (the university and beyond) have become deeply warped, colonized, ossified, broken. Technological progress has continued, due to strong political-economic incentives, although it too has suffered and slowed at the hands of our inefficient systems, as Peter Thiel has noted. But progress in the humanities has not just stalled; it has catastrophically halted and fractured; in fact, the very idea of ‘progress’ in this realm is mocked by the few who choose to enter it. The consequences of the collapse of humanities progress for our culture cannot be overstated. I do not believe that I can singlehandedly revive the humanities, and catch our culture up on decades of lost progress; but I do believe that I can spark a movement, and inspire others to help me do just that.

Junior year of college began for me with the full knowledge that I did not want to be molded any longer by messed-up academic structures; I knew then that I did not want to go to grad school, that I didn’t even want to still be in undergrad; I wanted to pursue the Great American Novel through self-study. But various factors caused me to stay, and I justified it by taking multiple extra courses, and in general continuing to go crazy in a fun and inspired way. I am glad I stayed, because junior year was when I met Alex K Chen, the superconnector; I became his favorite new obsession; through him, I met dozens and dozens of absolutely brilliant people, the sort of brilliant people who I had expected to meet when I first entered Harvard. Finally, I had found the radical thinkers, the world-changers. I got involved with Bay Area circles, psychedelic pioneers, and AI dreamers. I made life-changing connections and lifelong friends. It is these circles that have eventually led to me applying for the Thiel Fellowship; I have no idea how many fellows I met during these last few years, but I thought that since I wasn’t a startup person that I had no business applying. Jasmine Wang recently changed my mind on that, and I hope I am not too late. 

Finally, after my junior spring in 2019, I dropped out of Harvard. Technically I am on time off, and could return one day, but this is now my third year off in a row, and I would like to continue pursuing my path my own way. The first thing I did was hitchhike; in summer 2019, I had an amazing adventure hitchhiking from Los Angeles to Canada, zigzagging along the Pacific Crest. But then the reality of my life circumstances set in. My parents would not let me live at home for free without a job. So, I took the most morally-acceptable job I could, organizing volunteers in my region for AmeriCorps, helping kids in need access books. I was doing good, but not on the scale I knew I could; I ended up somewhat regretting the year-long commitment, especially since the pay was less than minimum wage. Covid, ironically, freed me from this, and I had enough money saved up to buy a school bus. I figure there would be no hitchhiking for a while, so I decided to renovate a school bus into a tiny home in order to continue the adventure; after all, there is so much more America to see. Bus people, RV people, van people, and other nomads had always been great rides as a hitchhiker, and it seemed similarly adventurous. I spent the rest of 2020 struggling to build the bus with little money and no experience. Eventually I heard about Skooliepalooza, an annual bus gathering in the Arizona desert; at this point, my life at home was a nightmare, with my delusional father increasing in insanity. I had to escape; with the help of $3000 I crowdfunded, I put all my belongings in an empty bus and went out to the desert in January 2021. The rest of the year was nothing short of amazing, the greatest adventure yet. I got on pandemic unemployment and survived for 10 months in the bus living as a dirtbag. I built a lot and learned a lot; the bus is at least 70% complete, with a solar system and redwood writing desk and everything. I lived the nomadic life in Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Nevada, California, Oregon, and Washington. I made beautiful places my backyard, I met incredible people, and I read and wrote as much as I could. I truly believe nomadic life is about to blow up; its increase in popularity is evident in Nomadland’s Best Picture Win and the enormous presence of #vanlife on Instagram and TikTok. People are clamoring for alternative lifestyles, and life on the road is both highly appealing and highly possible for most Americans. It is both cheaper and more fun than normal life as a renter. I am working on a Nomadic Manifesto, and aim to guide this movement and its values as it has increasing cultural impacts. 

After the unemployment ran out in September, I started working odd jobs to survive, but the money still kept running out. I will need to get food stamps in the future if I want to continue the nomadic life, and I do believe I need to continue it if I want to write. October to now has been what I hope is my rock bottom. I was dumped over FaceTime, and left alone and broke in Santa Cruz, where I was taken advantage of by some unsavory characters. It is the sort of experience very few Harvard students get to have. I had no gas money and no idea what to do next. I had promised my family I would come home for the holidays, to help take care of my mom after her hip surgery; it felt like the noble thing to do, despite how scary going home is for me. I was able to get the bus back to Arizona with the help of some friends, and I left the bus on a friend’s property because I couldn’t afford gas or a plane ticket across the country. And, in all honesty, I missed hitchhiking, and resented the way Covid had taken it away. So, I packed what I could into my old backpack, leaving behind my hundreds of books and everything else I owned, and I hitchhiked across the country home with my puppy in tow. It was a great adventure, and I am working on writing that story now; it will hopefully be done soon, although since being home I have not been able to write much. Sadly, I got Covid at the end of the trip, and have spent the last few weeks recovering slowly while also taking care of my family as we go through some difficult family issues. 

My Long Covid fatigue has made me all the more conscious of my desire to get funding for my project, because it has made me realize how precious my energetic hours are; I want to give my full effort and attention to my project, my destiny; time wasted on an hourly wage is not only bad for me, but it also deprives the world of the greater good I could produce. Furthermore, my mom would no longer need to worry about me forgoing food, health, safety, economic security, etc for the sake of my destiny. Of course, I am willing to work on other things beyond my core project, and I will work for a wage if I must to keep the project going. But my experience during the last two years off school has shown me that I progress much more slowly on this project than I want to because of my economic conditions. I’m fighting to tread water day after day; I’m sick of it; I want to swim freely, and create beautiful things for the world. I want to spend my time and effort on reading and writing and living the Great American Novel. Of course, the Thiel Fellowship is not the only grant I am applying for, but it is by far the best, and the one I want the most. I am not sure if Mr. Thiel has heard of the Horatio Alger story; Alger was a Harvard man and cheap fiction writer in the 19th century; his classic plot involves a young boy, smart and virtuous but caught in difficult circumstances of poverty; the boy somehow gets the attention of a wealthy benefactor, and he is enabled to pursue his American dream. I’m sure it would tickle Mr. Thiel to be the Alger-esque benefactor of the Great American Novel. Whether or not I am funded, the Great American Novel will happen sooner or later; I think it would be best for everyone if it happens sooner. With $100,000, I could live in my bus for the better part of a decade, and have many other adventures to boot. I could go to Alaska, I could go to Hawaii and Puerto Rico, I could hike the PCT, I could do anything. The adventure becomes truly unlimited. A typical Thiel Fellow could blow $100,000 in two years on Bay Area rent; I promise that a dollar spent on me could stretch much much farther.

The Great American Novel itself will be organized spatially and associationally, not just sequentially, enabling me to layer together a diverse mosaic of various adventures and characters, fictional and nonfictional, in order to ‘represent’ every aspect of ‘America’ I find important. Its bibliography alone will be a definitive course in American literature. Through conversations with drivers and people I meet, as well as my own introspections based on my wide reading, it will get at the heart of what America has been and could be. It will engage with important questions of freedom, democracy, nature, individuality, and much more. It will redefine the American national project and give people an inspirational myth to be a part of, something that spurs them to make positive change in the world through the vessel of the nation. But the project itself goes beyond the novel; it is my life. And I do not plan on waiting for the novel to be finished to have an impact. Along the way, I am writing essays to be released continuously; essays like ‘The Fiction of the Nation,’ ‘Democracy and Psychedelics,’ ‘On the Need for Democratic Literature,’ ‘What is Liberty?,’ ‘Pragmatic Idealism,’ ‘Nomadic Life,’ ‘Generation Z,’ “Can Democracy Work?,’ ‘Image, Typography, and Democracy,’ ‘Conservative, Progressive, Liberal,’ and many more. I plan to influence culture as soon as possible and as broadly as possible. I also plan on instigating cultural and political movements before the novel is finished, using what I have learned about America and my own self-confidence as an actor to generate powerful political movements. For example, I have worked out a constitutionally viable plan to reshape the state of Rhode Island into the State of Hope; I have worked out how to spark a movement towards a constitutional convention; and I have some ideas on how to break the two party system. The pursuit of the Great American Novel is really about using the power of national mythmaking for good by reshaping those myths in an intelligent way. The brand ‘America’ is at an all-time low. Now is the time to buy.