A cranky old guy and American fiction

 I know that American fiction didn’t begin with Mark Twain, but that’s about as far back as I can go. 

I wish I could appreciate early American fiction, but I can’t. I’d love to read the great novel of the American Revolution written in the 1780s or the great Civil War novel written in the 1870s. I’d like to read the great American novel of our own troubled times.

This line of thought began with William Least Heat-Moon’s description of a cranky old man who told  about going on a covered wagon tour, a kind of trail ride that recreated the western migration of the 1800s. The cranky old man went with a group that included a historian from the East, a likable guy who could explain the competing theories about why sensible people thought they had to leave settled lives behind and get into a covered wagon.

But the historian didn’t know how to sling a wagon. Hardwoods needed to repair wagons were scarce on the prairie, so people cut and dressed lumber and slung it under the wagon. The professor didn’t know what trees would make a decent axle or yoke. He couldn’t tell one tree from another. He didn’t know how to pack a wagon or what people carried. He had no real sense of how people cooked the evening meal.

That might suggest what I’m missing. I’ve read the primary sources — letters, diaries, newspapers — of the periods that interest me. But I haven’t read a novel that gives me the sense of the trail.

• Source: William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991, pp. 421-3.