(August-September 2024. This is the original version of my attempt to comprehensively summarize the core ideas of my Great American Novel Project, which I have pretty much dedicated my life to for these last seven years (and will probably continue for the next 17.) If you want to understand me and my writing, this would be a great place to start. If you’d prefer an easier read (about half as long), you should read the short version: The Great American Novel Project, Explained. If you’re reading this version after the more succinct one because you want more, the new sections are primarily a) in the middle, the section about ‘The Prophecy’, where I more deeply explore Emerson’s ‘The American Scholar’ and Whitman’s ‘1855 Leaves of Grass Preface’ in order to explain the history of the prophecy and contextualize the Great American Novel Project, and b) the last five paragraphs about becoming a writer and the importance of creating meaning in your life.)
The Great American Novel Project, Explained (The Long Version)
Introduction
If you’ve gotten to know me or read my writings over the last seven years, you’re probably aware that my life is dedicated to the ideal of the Great American Novel. I’d like to elaborate on this vision. The Great American Novel Project is an overarching meaning-web that ties together my adventures, my reading, and my writing into one cohesive experiment. It’s an experiment in the possibilities of self-creation, of autopoiesis, of writing one’s own story and actually living it into reality. It’s a metamodern bildungsroman. It is, in other words, an act of commitment to the bit.
Hitchhiking, the Spark of the Project
The spark of the Great American Novel (GAN) Project, prior to any literary associations, was my monkeyish desire to adventure, to explore, to experience life raw. When I was 18, during my freshman year at Harvard, I read On the Road; it was my first real exposure to the idea of hitchhiking. The concept fascinated me immediately: you’re telling me it used to be totally normal and possible to cross the entire continent just by sticking your thumb out and surfing the roads? Insane! Modern America lacks that sense of adventure which once defined the American spirit— that Wild Western attitude of explorers risking their lives to really go out into the world and experience something new. After all, to get on a boat and sail across the ocean to a ‘New World’ inherently selected for more adventurous individuals. But it seems as though, since at least the 60s, American generations have been increasingly ‘domesticated,’ discouraged from any genuine risk or adventure, encouraged to follow only beaten paths into what was once wilderness, all the while wrapped in bubble wrap. While risk-aversion can be prudent in certain situations, I think this has gone too far and made us spiritually weak. The human spirit craves challenge, novelty, and just the right dose of danger. Hitchhiking seemed like one of the last remaining ways to have a real adventure in the modern world, an adventure like the ones in the novels I loved to read growing up. These kinds of adventures seemed conspicuously absent in modern safetyist America, except on TV; I wanted to see if I could really pull it off. Plus, I had never really explored my country much beyond New England. I felt the simple impulse to see the world that every hot-blooded 18-year-old feels. Hitchhiking was a way to have a genuine adventure at minimal cost, to experience the vast country in which I happened to be born.
In planning that first hitchhiking trip, I got a lot of pushback from the adults in my life. Modern Americans often see hitchhiking as taboo, due to their fear of scary ‘others’, their perception that the world is simply ‘more dangerous these days.’ I did some research, and it turned out that hitchhiking is safer than ever in the modern world, not only because we have phones, but also because crime rates are way lower now than they were in decades when hitchhiking was totally normal. In other words, the data shows that it’s not that the world is ‘scarier these days;’ we just think it’s scarier. We have a taboo against hitchhiking because of a cultural shift that occurred in the last fifty years, a shift towards more fear of others, a breakdown in social trust, a breakdown of community into individuals Bowling Alone. This is the ascendency of the side that won when the hippies lost; this is the move to gated communities and the decline of unions and churches; this is the victory of corporate-consumer America over democratic America; this is the result of generations who believe that history’s been on autopilot since the Cold War. Of course, a lot of this cultural shift was driven by mass media, especially TV news and, more recently, social media; these mediums shape our sense of reality, and they have a structural bias towards fear-mongering, because fear very effectively hacks our attention and keeps us watching through the commercial break.
I became convinced that hitchhiking was actually much safer than it was perceived, certainly as safe as many other slightly dangerous things we culturally accept and normalize; furthermore, I became convinced that our culture’s fear of hitchhiking was actually a highly representative symptom of these larger problems. It strikes at the core of our division, our fear, our social breakdown. If democracy is based on the idea that we’re all inextricably interconnected, and so therefore our votes affect each other’s lives, then how can we have a democracy if we fear all our fellow citizens as potential murderers? Democracy requires the kind of social trust that hitchhiking represents. I was willing to bet that hitchhiking actually is still possible in 21st century America, that Americans are mostly good, and that it is still possible to trust in the kindness of strangers. I was willing to put my money where my mouth was; I was willing to bet my life on it.
After saving up $900 rolling burritos, I set off on a two-month adventure around America, hitchhiking 8000 miles, sleeping in all sorts of places (in Appalachia fog, atop a high hill in Missoula with a mountain lion, under unbelievable stars near Sedona, in an empty ski mansion one night and almost dying of exposure in the desert the next) and talking to all kinds of strangers (Bob the trucker who can tell good eggs from bad, a man who doesn’t kill me way out near the Lost Coast, a woman who was an accomplice in Albuquerque, a thousand kind souls who shared their lives with the boy in their passenger seat). Along the journey, I fell in love with this sense of diverse discovery, and I developed a desire to understand America as deeply as possible. By hitchhiking, I could see every corner of this beautiful country for nearly free. And, the more I explored, the more I realized there was left to explore in the future; America got bigger and bigger with every slice of it I saw.
By hitchhiking, I could also explore American culture by talking to as many strangers as possible. Normally, we meet new people through various constraints: friends of friends, coworkers, classmates, people who like the same hot yoga class, etc. There are definite, predictable limitations, contours, structures around the expansion of our social graph. The same effect happens online, where algorithms sort us into communication bubbles with those who are similar to us in some way. As a result, we have little exposure to all sorts of different kinds of people, and in most people’s normal lives, there are whole swaths of fellow Americans they will simply never interact with. But hitchhiking erases the beaten paths and opens possibilities; the only common denominator between you and a random driver is that you share basic human kindness and openness. You get to know strangers of all stripes without any preconditions; minimal selection effects are at play. You get exposed to genuine human diversity of the American psyche in a way that’s incredibly rare in the modern world; I think this is profoundly democratic.
It felt to me, especially after the 2016 election, that Americans were uncertain about their own identity as a nation. America is a unique country with a strange and short history; we are still creating ourselves, still debating who we’ve been and who we will become. Yet, many of the popular interpretations of America out there felt, to me, shallow and incomplete. Red and blue narratives, high school history summaries, the fake America on TV, the shallow Americas online— none of these stories felt sufficiently complex or compelling. America is a vast, diverse noun containing multitudes; I wanted to try to absorb those multitudes in order to help America understand itself, and to help inform our choices of who we’d like to become. Our democracy is shaped like everybody, the texture of every individual melted together. I wanted to learn the shape of this nation, and lean in.
In an America deeply divided by its epistemic bubbles, I had found the perfect way to pop my own so that I could truly interact with my fellow citizens. I fell in love with the Socratic dialogue of hitchhiking; I fell in love with adventuring around the continent and exploring nature; I fell in love with this burgeoning project of understanding America as deeply as possible.
Discovering the Prophecy
After my first hitchhiking adventure ended, I returned to school like a man on fire. I couldn’t stop reading and thinking. I realized that my project to understand America needed a third leg to supplement my physical adventures around the country and my discussions with fellow citizens— to truly understand America’s past, I needed to read my way through all the best American writing. America, I learned quickly, is a story— a story we the people get to write. Thus, the writings of great thinkers throughout American history— the best American literature, poetry, philosophy, history, speeches, etc— play a huge role in defining what America has been, is, could be. The more I read my way through the best American thought, the more I began to see a unified web take shape, a dialogue of American genius across generations: this writer influenced by that writer, this novelist disagreeing with this poet, these thinkers carrying the torch lit by someone 100 years prior. There were main threads— central themes of freedom, democracy, the self, idealism and pragmatism, progress and experience, civilization in dialogue with the raw frontier of nature. There were patterns, archetypes, representative characters spread across centuries. There were core questions continually reasked and reanswered. Most importantly, again and again appeared this notion of America as an autopoietic experiment, an ongoing story of we the people with the right to write and rewrite ourselves.
This wide reading of American thought led me to discover the ongoing prophecy of the Great American Novel. This may sound like something out of a fantasy novel, but I assure you it is quite real. It is not a prophecy that descended from supernatural origin, but a prophecy articulated and updated by American thinkers across generations. For almost 200 years, American writers have developed this prophecy of a work of art that strives to truly ‘represent,’ in the deepest sense, tying all the diverse threads that make up this vast composite nation into our version of a ‘national epic.’ This work must weave together a single tapestry of America’s diverse peoples, histories, cultures, ideas, and of course the varied features of the American landscape. It must do with art what the nation does with people— E Pluribus Unum— Out of Many, One. In representing America, this work of art will, by necessity, recreate America, just as a new Congress ought to recreate America simply by better representing the changes that have naturally occurred since the last elections.
Two writings in particular are most central to my understanding of the prophecy, and reading these for yourself is perhaps the best way to understand my project. First up is Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The American Scholar,” a speech he delivered at Harvard in 1837. This essay has been rightly called “the declaration of independence of American intellectual life.” In it, Emerson declares that “We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe”— it was now time for a new, distinctly American cultural identity, an American philosophy, an American literature. This would be developed by the ideal ‘American Scholar,’ one who “must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future.” He describes the three essential influences upon the mind of the American Scholar: nature, books, and active experience. From these three sources of the American Scholar, we can see the template for the three directives of the Great American Novel Project— the impulse to explore the American continent, read through the web of American literature, and live a life of real adventures in modern America.
The first and most important influence on the American Scholar is nature. “He must settle its value in his mind. What is nature to him? There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself. Therein it resembles his own spirit, whose beginning, whose ending, he never can find,— so entire, so boundless. Far, too, as her splendors shine, system on system shooting like rays, upward, downward, without centre, without circumference— in the mass and in the particle, nature hastens to render account of herself to the mind. Classification begins. To the young mind, everything is individual, stands by itself. By and by, it finds how to join two things, and see in them one nature; then three, then three thousand; and so tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on trying things together, diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running under the ground, whereby contrary and remote things cohere, and flower out from one stem.” Nature is the unifying essence which ties all things together in layers of abstraction across one web. In opening itself to the influence of nature, the mind learns that it is of the same expanding root, and in pursuing nature the American Scholar “shall look forward to an ever-expanding knowledge as to a becoming creator.” The mind is both of nature and nature’s perfect match: “One is seal, and one is print. [Nature’s] beauty is the beauty of his own mind. Its laws are the laws of his own mind. Nature then becomes to him the measure of his own attainments. So much of nature as he is ignorant of, so much of his own mind he does not yet possess. And, in fine, the ancient precent, “Know thyself,” and the modern precept, “Study nature,” become at last one maxim.” As I wrote in “The Stars,” “Stars are the skeleton key of the universe, the map that suggests the way things tend to interconnect… The clues we gain about the contours of physical reality will often reveal to us similar contours in the world of ideas.” To learn is to integrate a wider and deeper view of nature, which inevitably includes a wider and deeper understanding of ourselves. Thus, in the Great American Novel Project, I must integrate a wide and deep understanding of the contours of this continent, truly imprint myself with American nature, in order to better represent the American spirit.
The second influence on the American Scholar is the mind of the past, represented by books. Books are how society crystallizes truth in order to pass it on to the next generation. “The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age received into him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. It came into him, life; it went out from him, truth. It came to him, short-lived actions; it went out from him, immortal thoughts. It came to him, business; it went from him, poetry. It was dead fact; now, it is quick thought. It can stand, and it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now inspires. Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind from which it issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing.” Books result from a process of transmuting life into truth. “In proportion to the completeness of the distillation, so will the purity and imperishableness of the product be. But none is quite perfect. As no air-pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so neither can any artist entirely exclude the conventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or write a book of pure thought, that shall be as efficient, in all respects, to a remote posterity, as to contemporaries, or rather to the second age. Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.” Our distilled language strives to describe the ever-changing world, but will always fall a bit short as the world spirals outward beyond our capture. Thus, every generation must write their own Great American Novels. Reading the best writing can “impress us with the conviction, that one nature wrote and the same reads.” Often in my studies for this project, reading the most essential American writers, I have been struck with awe at the feeling that a writer from centuries ago “says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said.” This feeling of kinship with past writers in the great web of American thought has strengthened the more deeply I’ve woven my own mind into the web. It encourages me to believe that I am on the right track, to continue groping through the dark towards this distant star whose dim gravity grows slightly stronger as I go. However, one must be careful not to worship books blindly, or merely copy them as dogmatic truth: Books “are for nothing but to inspire.” They are fuel for originality. “One must be an inventor to read well.” My reading of the American past must be brought into dialogue with the American present, for the sole purpose of gaining perspective on the new world in order to adapt to it and progress beyond it.
The final influence on the American Scholar is action, real life experience. “Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it, he is not yet man. Without it, thought can never ripen into truth.” The true scholar, who wishes to really grasp the world, must have courage. “Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind. The preamble of thought, the transition through which it passes from the unconscious to the conscious, is action. Only so much do I know, as I have lived. Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life, and whose not.” The world of nature pulls us into participation with it, and it is only through this active and ongoing experiment in the messy chaos of life that we genuinely develop our ideas. The world’s “attractions are the keys which unlock my thoughts and make me acquainted with myself. I run eagerly into this resounding tumult. I grasp the hands of those next to me, and take my place in the ring to suffer and to work, taught by an instinct, sthat so shall the dumb abyss be vocal with speech. I pierce its order; I dissipate its fear; I dispose of it within the circuit of my expanding life. So much only of life as I know by experience, so much of the wilderness have I vanquished and planted, or so far have I extended my being, my dominion. I do not see how any man can afford, for the sake of his nerves and his nap, to spare any action in which he can partake. It is pearls and rubies to his discourse. Drudgery, calamity, exasperation, want, are instructors in eloquence and wisdom. The true scholar grudges every opportunity of action past by, as a loss of power. It is the raw material out of which the intellect moulds her splendid products.” The true American Scholar cannot be shut up in an ivory tower; they must act in the real drama of life. “The mind now thinks; now acts; and each fit reproduces the other.” Thought and action engender one another in a cycle, as hypothesis leads to experiment leads back to hypothesis.
Experience itself is the point of life. While Emerson himself was more of a thinker than a doer, he is the most essential origin of uniquely American philosophy. Most great American writers, poets, and thinkers can trace their roots back to him, whether or not they realize it. He is the beginning of a thread that some scholars call America’s “Cult of Experience,” the proclivity of American thinkers to be heavily invested in real-world action. Our best writers have experimented with the edges of experience, explored wilderness, pushed the limits of possibility; they have been courageous; they have participated in war, politics, dangerous adventures, altered states of consciousness, social subversion, new technologies. The Beats in the 1950s are just one such example of this thread. Melville, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Baldwin— these writers were active in the joys, battles, failures, and discoveries of their times. My Great American Novel Project prizes action, courage, and experience. To me, it can only be the true Great American Novel if it’s based on a true story— a true story that’s exciting, alive, and explores the edges of what’s possible in 21st century America.
The second writing which is essential to my understanding of the prophecy is Walt Whitman’s revolutionary 1855 Leaves of Grass Preface. This preface ought to be taught in every high school; it is as essential to America’s cultural inheritance as anything else ever written. In it, Walt writes that “The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.” This idea that America is itself already a poem, awaiting only a translator, animates my poetry map and my overall project. The essence of poetry is the relationship between parts and larger wholes; this goes beyond writing. The land, the past, the people— these are all lines in the poem: “The American poets are to enclose old and new for America is the race of races. Of them a bard is to be commensurate with a people. To him the other continents arrive as contributions . . . he gives them reception for their sake and his own sake. His spirit responds to his country’s spirit. . . . he incarnates its geography and natural life and rivers and lakes…. The genius of the United States is… always most in the common people.” The unique elements of this newly developing nation’s culture “are unrhymed poetry. It awaits the gigantic and generous treatment worthy of it.” It awaits the ideal of the Great American Novel, or the Great American Poem, which is to say the same thing. A nation cannot be great by material success alone “without a corresponding largeness and generosity of the spirit of the citizen.” “Of all nations the United States with veins full of poetical stuff most need poets and will doubtless have the greatest and use them the greatest. Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their poets shall.” It is the writer, the artist, which truly binds a nation together into a single spiritual whole, by putting all parts into meaningful relationship with one another and binding diversity into unity. The poet “bestows on every object or quality its fit proportions neither more nor less. He is the arbiter of the diverse and he is the key. He is the equalizer of his age and land. . . . he supplies what wants supplying and checks what wants checking.” The poet is the vision of the tribe: “What the eyesight does to the rest he does to the rest.” This vision allows America to see more clearly who they are and where they would like to go.
Lest we take Whitman’s grandiosity too literally, let’s acknowledge that he is playing a character here. He is performing this larger-than-life arrogant American poet; he is describing an aspirational version of himself, an ideal that he hopes future American writers can be inspired by and strive towards on this ever-unfinished journey towards American self-realization. Throughout this Preface, and the rest of Whitman’s poetry, he plays a character of the ultimate liberal-democratic individual, an expansive open selfhood that accepts and integrates all inputs (just as the ideal America absorbs all immigrants). This character represents America’s optimism and open orientation towards an ever-expanding future. It represents America’s paradoxical pride in individualism and in democracy. For Whitman values both himself and all others things equally supremely; in truth, everything is one, everyone else in the universe collaboratively composes the ‘Song of Myself.’ Self-love and outer-love can grow ever-larger as long as they are balanced: the poet must have “sympathy as measureless as [their] pride and the one balances the other and neither can stretch too far while it stretches in company with the other.”
Whitman is not only a poet; he is a philosopher, a psychologist, and even, implicitly, a prophet for a new American civic religion, which he sees correctly as necessary to a truly functioning democracy. Whitman’s civic religion is meant to be compatible with all other religions, as America’s individuality is compatible with all other individualities. He even provides his own version of the Ten Commandments or the Beatitudes: “This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.”
One wonderful thing about Whitman is that he is always conscious of his position as the first truly American poet, the one who literally frees verse from ancient constraints of rhyme and meter, the one who will do more than anyone else to define the American voice. As such, he often speaks directly to his poetic descendents, “the stalwart and wellshaped heir who approaches” who “shall be fittest for his days.” This direct communication with his heirs is part of why his influence on American poets is so inescapable, why American poets like Theodore Roethke and Jean Toomer and Allen Ginsberg and June Jordan and myself and thousands more all feel such a strong personal influence by Walt on our writing. Thus, in the Preface, Walt imagines this ideal character of the American poet into existence by sketching a sort of blueprint for what “the greatest poet” must do. “The greatest poet forms the consistence of what is to be from what has been and is. He drags the dead out of their coffins and stands them again on their feet. . . . he says to the past, Rise and walk before me that I may realize you. He learns the lesson. . . . he places himself where the future becomes present. . . . he glows a moment on the extremest verge.” The poet must live at the frontier of the past and the future; they must perceive themselves as the fulfillers of shared prophecies (hmmm…).
The poet must be a vessel for the voice of the country. “The greatest poet has less a marked style and is more the channel of thoughts and things without increase or diminution, and is the free channel of himself.” The poet needs simply to be the channel for the poetry already latent in the world, a translator for the land and its people. This is core to my theory of the Great American Novel; the GAN is, in a sense, already out there, waiting, ripe for the taking; it simply needs to be translated into English by someone willing to listen and put all the pieces together. This thought is strangely comforting and encouraging; it implies that you don’t need to be any kind of special genius to write the Great American Novel; you simply must be willing to open yourself to absorbing the novel that’s already there by experiencing America, and willing to put in the effort of actually writing it down. To be a good channel, the Great American Novelist must be honest. “All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candor. Henceforth let no man of us lie, for we have seen that openness wins the inner and outer world and that there is no single exception.” They must also be courageous, for “the young man who composedly periled his life and lost it has done exceeding well for himself, while the man who has not periled his life and retains it to old age in riches and ease has perhaps achieved nothing for himself worth mentioning.”
Ultimately, the American poet strives to represent America itself— and in representing it, merges with it: “The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.” In absorbing one another, both the self and the nation evolve beyond their former boundaries. America is an ever-expanding noun. It is a ‘becoming’ more than a ‘being.’ Its borders are semi-permeable and always growing to absorb new life, new poems, new peoples, new ideas. It is a synecdoche or metaphor for the universe; for Whitman, America is of metaphysical significance. It is our chance to live out the drama of the universe in miniature— a journey to merge with everything that exists. The mind of nature yearns towards unity in diversity. The American poet is to live out this metaphysical drama; like America itself, the American mind yearns to meet all things, absorb all things, touch all things, represent all things. The American nation is a useful stepping stone to eternity; the American poet strives to absorb America as America strives to absorb the universe. “The direct trial of him who would be the greatest poet is today. If he does not flood himself with the immediate age as with vast oceanic tides . . . and if he does not attract his own land body and soul to himself and hang on its neck with incomparable love and plunge his semitic muscle into its merits and demerits . . . and if he be not himself the age transfigured . . . and if to him is not opened the eternity which gives similitude to all periods and locations and processes and animate and inanimate forms, and which is the bond of time, and rises up from its inconceivable vagueness and infiniteness in the swimming shape of today, and is held by the ductile anchors of life, and makes the present spot the passage from what was to what shall be, and commits itself to the representation of this wave of an hour and this one of the sixty beautiful children of the wave— let him merge in the general run and wait his development.” This merging is the task of the Great American Novel Project.
It is serious business, as well as joyful good luck, to discover an unfulfilled prophecy. Some people don’t believe in the value of such things, but I do. Meaning-making is a curious, powerful phenomenon; often, by merely choosing to believe in something fantastic, we begin to discover that fantastic things are real, or, at the very least, that believing in such things can be useful and make life feel more worth living. Here we are, thrown choicelessly into existence, slowly discovering that we exist in the context of a story already half-written but never finished. And lo! We come to find that the simulation writers, God, or blind chance threw a plot thread in there which is conspicuously unresolved. I grew up reading too many fantasy novels to ignore a prophecy which seemed tailor-made for exactly what I’d already started working on, a prophecy which seemed tailor-made for me to fulfill. Of course, I don’t believe that anything supernatural happened here, or that I am the only one who can do this task. Rather, I think just about any American could pursue the prophecy, if they only knew about it. It is there for the taking. It’s not about being chosen by a prophecy, but choosing to make a prophecy one’s own, choosing to believe in its value, choosing to act towards its realization. In fact, this democratic opportunity, the fact that anyone can pursue the Great American Novel, seems essential to who we are as a nation. Everyone can be their own main character. Everyone can enter into relationship with everyone else. Everyone can pursue something larger than themselves. I look forward to reading many other Great American Novels in my lifetime.
American National Pride
It often feels like I found the prophecy abandoned in the muck, plucking a silvery pearl covered in mud out from the ditch in which it was forgotten. For America’s first two centuries, many American artists and intellectuals actively participated in nation-building, in creating a new national identity for the new nation. They saw America as this wonderful story that they were lucky enough to help write; they wrote American plays and American novels and American dictionaries and American poems and American stories in order to bind us together. Stories bind us together more powerfully than anything else. They were proud of America and wanted to give us new reasons to be proud. They recognized that national pride facilitates national improvement, just as self-love is a precondition to self-improvement. But, somewhere along the way, we lost this plot.
Something happened in the 1960s and 1970s. People seemed to sort of give up on the idea that America was a story still to be told and retold, a story worth embracing and advancing. It’s almost as if, in the turmoil of the 60s and the guilt of racial struggles and the tragedy of the Vietnam War, America lost its self-respect, lost sight of the noble story that had animated it. On the right, in defending segregation and the crimes in Vietnam, patriotism became a superficial thing, supporting a hollow version of American greatness. This is the person who sees America as good because it is great, not great because it is good; who thinks ‘might makes right’; who values our military and our money more than our stories and ideals; who sees America as a brand name, like Budweiser; who does not think America is an ongoing project in need of constant improvement, but rather a settled thing which only needs to be defended from any change. Meanwhile, on the left, wracked with guilt about Vietnam and a growing consciousness of America’s many failures to live up to its own ideals, patriotism became associated with evil. A cynicism set in, suspicious of national pride as complicit in atrocities. The left, particularly the intellectuals who had once been most responsible for creating an aspirational American story, now saw America as irredeemably sinful. They cast the baby out with the bathwater. It became unfashionable to talk about the American nation as anything special or good; focus shifted outward, to global narratives of neoliberalism, or inward, to investigation of smaller identity groups within America. In doing so, the American left abandoned their duty. Critiquing America is a good thing, but if the critique is driven by hating America rather than loving it, then it is impotent, useless, and destructive. A more authentic post-60s left would have embraced the attitude of James Baldwin, when he said “I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” Criticism without positive action is worse than useless.
In history, many attitudes and movements tend to follow the law of the pendulum: things swing back and forth, overcompensating in one direction then the other. American politics and culture have been dominated for the last 50 years by these bad attitudes on both the right and the left. Both attitudes are fundamentally spectatorial; they are content to comment on politics from a distance, from the couch in front of the TV, without taking actual action. Thus, a sort of impotence settled into our politics, as institutions and corporations ran away with everything; thus, a culture of irony and cynicism, of criticism and fear; thus, a sort of national divorce, an inability to get on the same page, runaway polarization between two completely different TV stories of America, while we lack the sort of unifying cultural stories that bound us together through the mid-20th century. It is almost as if we’ve been coasting off of the powerful American unity that produced our institutions during and after World War II; those institutions were so powerful that we’ve been able to wobble along even still to this day without collapse, despite the fact that the spiritual and cultural unity that produced those institutions has been drained. The bottom has fallen out, but the plane is still flying— just barely. Still, the cracks are showing.
I believe that people are starting to realize that we cannot be a functioning nation based only on economic and governmental entanglement. To thrive as a democratic nation, we need to become a true tribe; tribes are bound together by stories, culture, beliefs, values, and art. I believe that the pendulum is finally starting to swing back towards an embrace of the positive power of healthy patriotism. It’s funny— when I started this project in 2017, it felt downright countercultural, since pretty much everyone at Harvard took it for granted that America was Bad. But I knew the tides would shift one day; I knew that, when the things we take for granted start falling apart, we’d need to have a serious reckoning with our national identity. We’d have to face the fact that we need to actively create a positive American story in order to make real progress. National pride is essential for national improvement as self-love is essential for self-improvement. I can already see, in 2024, a growing wave of positive American patriotism, a patriotism that seeks to continually rewrite a better future out of the raw materials of our gray past. The Great American Novel Project is ready to ride this wave, and push it beyond what we once thought was possible.
The Great American Novel
In truth, there can never be only one Great American Novel. More accurately, we should think of a polytheistic pantheon of Great American Novels, or, perhaps, a Congress of Great American Novels. This is, after all, a pluralistic nation. Each of the many GANs contributes something essential to the whole, represents some element of ‘America’ well. I’ve made it my business to read as many of these great novels as I can; there are hundreds. (Gun to my head, if I had to pick a single existing novel as the Great American Novel, I’d have to go with Moby-Dick. But of course, there is no such gun. America is large and contains multitudes.)
However, the ideal of the singular Great American Novel, the One Ring to Rule them All, is still alive. While most writers of the last 50 years have abandoned the universalizing ideal in favor of writing more ‘local’ GANs about particular regions or identities, the dream of the white whale remains unfulfilled. There is still no single great novel that takes place in all 50 states, that represents diverse American experiences, that absorbs the majesty of the American continent, that enters into dialogue with all the other GANs. The Platonic Ideal Great American Novel, in my view, must be a road novel (Americans love roads, they physically connect the country, and they provide natural adventure); it must be a bildungsroman (just like a young person develops their self as they grow with the world, so too the young nation America develops); and it must be a conspectus of American thought (by explicitly and implicitly referencing other great American writers, the novel will place itself as a central node in American discourse, such that any highschool student could use the book as a starting point for exploring the great web of American thought.) It is crazy to me that, all these years into the American experiment, we are still missing this ambitious, unifying novel— despite its clear parameters! All someone has to do is to do it. The singular dream is still unfulfilled, and the need for it is stronger than ever. Americans need a unifying story in order to survive and thrive in the 21st century.
Now, it is of course impossible to ever create one perfect and final Great American Novel; after all, America itself is always growing and changing; the world always moves faster than words can capture it. Yet, it is still worth our effort to strive towards the ideal, as towards an asymptotic limit in mathematics. While we may never fully reach it, we will create something wonderful in our approach. By striving for the ideal GAN, we are more likely to at least produce a minor GAN worthy of its place in the pantheon. Of course, striving for something so massive will take an enormous amount of dedication and hard work. It will take many years, probably decades. There is no guarantee that it will succeed. But I have faith that the ideal of the Great American Novel is something achievable, or at least asymptotically approachable, and that whatever art results from consciously progressing towards this ideal over a long period of time will be valuable to America and to humanity at large. In the American Pragmatist vein of William James’ The Will to Believe, the Great American Novel ideal is a ‘live’ hypothesis, one that requires my prior belief in order to test whether or not it is indeed true. In other words, the only way to find out if it’s possible is to act as if it were possible in advance. Science and art have always required a dash of faith. The Great American Novel Project is, therefore, much more about the process than the end product.
This understanding of the Great American Novel Project as primarily a belief in a process is, I think, the most important frame I want to convey in this essay. It profoundly shifts the question from “What is the Great American Novel?” to “What kind of life could possibly lead to the Great American Novel?” I find this much more interesting, and much more actionable. It illuminates the last 7 years of my life and will continue to influence the next 17. My answer to the question is, of course, my life. I’ve made my life into something truly unique these last seven years of pursuing this project, and I do believe that it is the kind of life that could possibly lead to the GAN.
With this project as my guiding ideal, I’ve become an unbelievable character. In fact, I’ve gone a lot farther with it than I ever intended to. I’ve hitchhiked 21,000 miles and talked to thousands of strangers. I have heard incredible stories from crazy characters and experienced my own. I’ve driven my own bus 60,000 miles and lived on public land in beautiful natural places all over the country. I’ve driven other vehicles at least another 60,000 miles— I lose track. I’ve read my way through hundreds of great books. I’ve dropped out of Harvard and made my own way in life on the road. I built a perfect home out of a schoolbus, a home that lets me live in nature, have constant adventures, and carry my books with me to read and write. I’ve seen more of this continent than anyone my age, and imprinted the poetry of its mountains and rivers in my soul. Memories of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the California coast, the Colorado Rockies, the Mojave Desert, and the Mississippi River are integral parts of my psyche; the story of myself is bound up in the physical geography of this country.
I’ve made incredible friends, worked on insane projects, and careened my way through life bumping into things. I’ve become friends with very interesting people, expanded the surface area of my luck, and made beautiful mistakes. I’ve hopped a train, built an app, had a gun pointed at my chest, and even **** * **** ** ******* *** ***. I’ve both purposefully and unconsciously accelerated the pace of my own adventures to the point that they all cascade into one another nonstop; the flywheel spins faster and faster, and I lean into it; I hardly catch my breath from one all-nighter cross-country drive before 3 other stories demand my attention the very next day. I’ve made too many friends and involved myself in too many plotlines to juggle. I let the flow take me away. Just last week, I left my blue bus to drive a red bus from San Francisco to Texas for a crazy startup that pays me to drive around America as an ambassador for a new high-tech city in Texas; I’ve driven this red bus 50,000 miles around America the last 2 years alone. My job is literally just ‘road trip.’ Then, I drove my dog, the greatest adventure dog in American literature, home to Massachusetts via rental car— another 2000 miles in under two days— and flew right back to San Francisco for Burning Man hours after arriving in Mass. Whiplash. Of course, this is omitting the beat, sleepless adventures before and after this tidbit. By spreading my life around the country, I’ve forced myself to live a continental life, and the plot will only get thicker. At this point, my widespread plot responsibilities naturally take me across the country at high speeds. If anything, I am underplaying how insane this life has become so quickly. Turns out, if you keep nudging yourself into new situations, your life can end up in some pretty wild places downstream; you might surprise yourself with who you become.
I’ve become this real character, a caricature of myself, someone who committed to the bit all the way through— who fits in American literature as well as any Jay Gatsby or Captain Ahab, and who has already far surpassed the real life adventures of a Neal Cassady (driving crazier buses through harder circumstances with higher stakes) or an Alexander Supertramp (with twice his hitching miles and counting). I’ve pushed the limits of my body with a masochistic willingness to wince and a lust for raw experience at any cost. The adventure’s momentum has simply run away with me; I am half-driver, half-passenger in my own story. I astonish myself with wild joy; I surprise myself by how absurd I’ve allowed the story to become. I giggle on the side of an on-ramp; I cackle at my own freedom in the dark woods. I am absolutely out of my mind in all the best ways. I’m Beat, transcendental, democratic, individualistic, freedom-loving, nature-loving, a pragmatist, an idealist, a cowboy, an angel, a hitchhiker— I’m All-American. I can say it with my whole chest. My name is Aidan Fitzsimons, and I’ve lived enough unbelievable adventures in the last seven years to write a dozen Great American Novels. I could spend a lifetime just writing these stories, and the adventure isn’t going to stop anytime soon. I’d love to tell you all about it.
You
The dream of the Great American Novel includes the story of my life and yours. You are an integral part of this adventure, just as you are an integral, essential, indivisible part of the story of America. In a sense, every American lives their own Great American Novel. Furthermore, all our stories are inextricable from one another. It is impossible to fully tell the story of who you are without understanding your descent from your parents, grandparents, and ancestors all the way back; without honoring the thousands of little ways friends, lovers, classmates, coworkers, and strangers have changed you; without reference to the ways American history, culture, government, industry, and, most importantly, nature— the unique shapes of this incredible land, the contours of this American continent and its people, the dense little pocket of it all in which you grew from the soil, water, air, and words, whenever you arrived— have shaped you.
E Pluribus Unum: Out of Many, One. Perhaps the truest ideal of the Great American Novel is the sum total of all our tales, the limit approached if everyone’s stories were told all the way through, the weighted web woven of all our overlapping diversity and common threads. I want to put America in dialogue with itself— to put all our stories together, and share them. I guess that’s why I love hitchhiking, reading books, talking to strangers, and hanging with my friends. They’re all the same thing, in a sense— a way to learn, to touch and be touched, to widen my own story in contact with yours. If you’re reading this, you’re already a part of my Great American Novel, and part of many others as well. I hope you share your piece of America with me as we travel this one long road together. Thanks for coming along for the ride.
🙂
Becoming a Writer
Of course, the other aspect of the project is actually writing about all these experiences. There’s a recurring motif in many Great American Novels of the two main characters being a) the thoughtful, writerly, perceptive narrator who is fascinated by b) the larger-than-life slightly-insane protagonist who pushes the possibilities of experience. So, we get Ishmael telling the story of Ahab in Moby-Dick, Nick telling the story of Gatsby in The Great Gatsby, or Jack Kerouac telling the story of Neal Cassady in On the Road. When I first started this project at 18, I thought I was gonna be Jack Kerouac, a writer focused on telling the stories of all the crazy characters I met hitchhiking. But, as this project took on a life of its own, it became increasingly clear that my natural disposition was not to be the writer, but to be instead the crazy main character. I didn’t mean for this to happen, but something in my natural personality brought it out in the face of the situations I threw this body into. Thus, I couldn’t stick with my original plan to simply write the GAN on the backbone of my first hitchhiking loop around the country, even though that one adventure was already plenty material for a solid novel. No, I needed to keep adventuring; hitchhiking was not something I had done once but something I do as the character I am. So I dropped out, and I kept adventuring, until it became a character trait so deeply ingrained as to take on a life of its own. This has been great for providing material for the novel… but not so good for actually writing it. There’s simply no time for something that takes as long as good writing when adventures are knocking down your door. The character has run away with my life, and the writer can barely keep up. As a result, I worry that I’ve forgotten a majority of my amazing adventures. There’s almost never time to stop, relax, take a breath, and spend a few days processing the last adventure to write about it, because the next adventure has already started. I need to get to the desert, I need to get home, I need to make money, I need to build some new upgrade to my bus, I need to get to Alaska, I need to get to Hawai’i, I need to see my friends, I need to get to the tallest tree in the world. Once I reach the tallest tree in the world, there’s obviously no time to write about it; I need to see my friends in Shasta by tomorrow. So it goes.
This is not to say, of course, that I have not been writing; far from it. These last 7 years, and especially the last 5 years of being a dropout, have been a time of incredible growth in my writing abilities. I am, slowly but surely, getting better at this. It’s hard, hard work, but it was what I set out to do, and I’m sticking with it. You can see most of what I’ve accomplished with writing at my free website, beatinpaths.com. One thing I realized early on is that there is no way I could write a GAN on my first try in my early 20s. That’s simply unrealistic. Writing is hard work and takes thousands of hours of practice to get good at. Thus, I shifted the project’s process. The idea is to write smaller things— essays, articles, poetry, stories, etc.— that all in some way connect to the larger ideal of the Great American Novel Project. All of these smaller mosaic tiles can later be re-used as pieces of the novel; until then, I can develop as a writer with more realistic goals. My website represents this work of the last 5 years. The biggest surprise to me was my development as a poet; that was never really my intention, but over the last 3 years in particular I have become a damn good poet, just by naturally writing poems whenever I feel inspired to. I think this practice in poetry will pay large dividends down the line, since poesis is sort of the essence of all language arts; practice on the fundamental level of the line will inevitably serve me in writing longer pieces. Poetry is much easier than longer essays or stories— you can ride the inspiration all the way out, and it’s fun. With longer pieces, it’s not always fun; it’s often brute work to squeeze words out of you.
When given a choice between adventuring more and writing a long piece, I’ve usually chosen the former— unless there’s some strong incentive for me to write, like when Earthship paid me for my ‘Sequoia Papers,’ the long essays on the front of my website. I’m hoping that launching this Substack will create that incentive, that external motivation. If I feel compelled to produce some piece of good writing every week for my friends and fans who are paying money for my writing, that ought to incentivize more consistent production of longer and better pieces of writing. Hopefully this will lead to me not only diving back into the archives to write about old adventures I’m at risk of forgetting, but also incentivize me to write about my adventures as they happen or right after they happen, minimizing the amount of details from my adventures I’ll forget in the future. When choosing what to do with my time, I’ll more frequently choose to write about my last adventure rather than zoom off to the next; after all, I want to get paid, and I want to honor the people who believe in me. In other words, this platform is intended to create the ‘infrastructure’ for the Great American Novel Project— to accelerate the writing process towards the ideal of the Great American Novel. This right here is the Great American Novel Project in action.
Why have I dedicated my life so wholeheartedly to this project, despite how long it will take and how difficult it will be? The core motivation is that it makes my life feel meaningful to be dedicated to a larger project. I think human beings on some level need larger causes to devote themselves to, like religion or war; without these, we become depressed. A feeling of existential meaninglessness can settle in. In the very first paragraph of Moby-Dick, our narrator Ishmael tells us why he decides to go on a perilous voyage at sea: “Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off— then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.” Danger distracts from depression. There is something deep in our biology that craves the unknown. Going on a grand adventure is a great way to stave off existential despair, to make one’s life feel meaningful. This effect is especially powerful when the adventure itself means something to you by virtue of its connection with larger concerns— things like the nation, the tribe, God, family, nature, the universe. I’ve argued elsewhere that a sense of meaning is essentially a sense of connection— connection with other human beings and the social whole as a window into connection with nature at large. I think certain people— people who have experienced profound tragedy, suffered more than they needed to, when they were young or as adults— have an extra strong need to make meaning of their lives. Meaning-making allows human beings to survive any suffering; it makes life worth it, no matter what. Ultimately, meaning-making is what keeps us alive.
Thus, on one level, this project provides me with the joys of adventure— courage, risk, and novelty, an invigorating encounter with the unknown. This satisfies my testosterone-fueled biological urge to risk my life in healthy ways. On another level, I am able to connect these invigorating individual adventures with the larger ideal of the Great American Novel Project, something that makes me feel like I’m a part of a larger meaningful universe, an abstract meaning-nexus broad enough to connect with just about anything while also specific and relevant enough as to be concretely actionable. This project combines my natural desire for adventure and my strong need for meaning in order to create something unique for my tribe, my nation, the people I love. I want to perform a service that I believe can be valuable, and add my unique mark to the world. Like everyone else, I needed to find a way to contribute my own verse to the powerful play. This project— and this life— fill me with great, unspeakable joy.
Beatin' Paths ~~~ The journey to the Great American Novel 