shows us another way of life.” -John Freeman, Denver Post Almost every page in American Nomads features a piece of writing so graceful and energetic that it makes you want to grab your wallet and head to the nearest Trailways bus station. He can sketch better landscape than just about any travel journalist alive, which makes it easy to imagine ourselves in the boots of explorers in a strange land. “Grant is a lyrical, yet controlled writer. What unites these disparate characters, as they range back and forth across the centuries, is a stubborn conviction that the only true freedom is to roam across the land. “Americans dream about burning down the house and saddling up the horse and it’s been that way ever since the plains were knee deep in buffalo shit.”Īlong with a personal account, American Nomads traces the history of wandering in the New World, through vividly told stories of frontiersmen, fur trappers and cowboys, Comanche and Apache warriors, all the way back to the first Spanish explorers who crossed the continent.

“Forget the white picket fence, the house in the suburbs, the monthly mortgage payment and all that crap,” says a truck driver Grant rode with on one of his adventures. Fascinated by the land of endless horizons, sunshine, and the open road, Richard Grant spent fifteen years wandering throughout the United States, never spending more than three weeks in one place, and getting to know America’s nomads-truckers, tramps, rodeo cowboys, tie-dyed T-shirt concert followers, flea market traders, retirees who live year-round in their RVs, and the murderous Freight Train Riders of America (FTRA).Īs an outsider aching for the “balm of motion,” Grant uses these lives and his own to examine the myths and realities of the wandering life, and its contradiction with the sedentary American dream.

American nomads by richard grant