(August-September 2024. This is the place to start if you want to understand my life’s work in a succinct way. It is half the length of the original full GAN Project explainer piece, making this one much more accessible for a general audience. I focus on the essentials. Perfect mix of thoroughness and briefness.)
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The Great American Novel Project, Explained
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Introduction
If you’ve gotten to know me or read my writings these last seven years, you might know that I’m obsessed with 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, readings, and writings into one cohesive experiment. It’s an experiment in the possibilities of self-creation, of writing one’s own story and actually living it into reality. It’s a metamodern bildungsroman. In other words, it’s an act of commitment to the bit.
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Hitchhiking, the Spark of the Project
The spark of the Great American Novel (GAN) Project 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: I couldn’t believe that 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 once was wilderness, all the while wrapped in bubble wrap. While risk-aversion can be prudent in certain situations, I think it’s gone too far and made us spiritually weak. The human spirit craves challenge, novelty, and just the right dose of lively 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 that every hot-blooded 18-year-old feels— the need to see the world. Hitchhiking was a way to have a genuine adventure at minimal cost, to experience this vast continent upon 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.’ But I did some research, and it turns out that hitchhiking is actually 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 considered 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. In fact, J. Edgar Hoover used the FBI to help spread the ‘hitchhiker = murderer” myth to damage the anti-war left; American society absorbed this meme and developed it further as we became a more scared, individualistic, lonely people from the mid-70s onwards through today. We have a taboo against hitchhiking because of a larger cultural shift that occurred in the last fifty years, a shift towards fear of others, a breakdown in social trust, a breakdown of community into individuals Bowling Alone. This is the ascendancy 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 the complacency of history’s wealthiest generations, and the belief 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 accept and normalize. Furthermore, I became convinced that our culture’s fear of hitchhiking was actually a highly representative symptom of these larger problems. To hitchhike is a radical act; 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 that therefore our votes and actions 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. I slept 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 before almost dying of exposure in the desert the next) and talked 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 living nation, and lean into it.
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.
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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— 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 that poet, these thinkers carrying a torch lit by someone 100 years prior. There are main threads— central themes of freedom, democracy, the self, idealism and pragmatism, progress and experience, culture 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 book, 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 about a work of art that strives to truly ‘represent’ America 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 words 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.” Emerson describes three essential influences upon the mind of the American Scholar: nature, books, and active experience. From these 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 second writing essential to 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 lays out a vision of what America’s poet must do to truly merge with America, because “The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.” To Whitman, “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem,” and I’ve learned through experience that this is more than true. My job is to share this ongoing continental poem with the American people.
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. Whitman embodied the experience-chasing ideal far more powerfully than his master. Our best writers have always 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.
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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 the United States’ 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 shape; 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 can promote national improvement, just as self-love is necessary for 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 itself as complicit in atrocities. The left, 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, giving up on positive nationalism in their attempt to distance themselves from negative nationalism. 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 to help create a useful positive narrative that can better our country. 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. 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.
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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 me for decades to come. 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 inspiration, my life has become a nonstop adventure. 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 80,000 miles— I lose track. I’ve read my way through endless great books. Even though I was lucky enough to get into Harvard at 16 from a small public school, I left for five years to make 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 risked my life in hundreds of ways, 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 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 Austin 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 dreams and my relationships around the country, I’ve forced myself to live a continental life, and the plot will only keep getting thicker. At this point, my widespread plot responsibilities naturally take me across the country at high speeds. This all might sound absurd, but if anything, I am underplaying how insane this life has become so quickly. Turns out, if you keep nudging yourself into challenging 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, someone who committed to the bit all the way through— a character who fits in American literature as well as any fictional 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 burn 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 take you along for the ride.
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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.
🙂
Beatin' Paths ~~~ The journey to the Great American Novel 