The Lincoln Highway
The Lincoln Highway
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Amor Towles on The Lincoln Highway
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A stowaway, a farm, and a decade of waitingThe premise for this novel sat in a notebook labeled ‘Unfinished Business’ for more than a decade before a word of the book was written. Towles had been in the middle of drafting ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’ when the image arrived, and he simply wrote it down and kept going.
I only remember being struck — more than a decade ago — by the notion of an honorable young man being driven home from a juvenile work program to the family farm only to discover that two of his fellow inmates have stowed away in the warden’s car.
The choice to write this book immediately after ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’ was a deliberate inversion: a Russian aristocrat confined to a single hotel for thirty years gave way to teenagers with an entire continent in front of them. Towles treats each new project as a chance to break whatever habits the previous book formed.
When I finish writing a novel, I find myself wanting to head in a new direction. That’s why after writing Rules of Civility — which describes a year in the life of a young woman about to climb New York’s socioeconomic ladder — I was eager to write A Gentleman in Moscow — which describes three decades in the life of a Russian aristocrat who’s just lost everything. The Lincoln Highway allowed me to veer again in that the novel focuses on three eighteen-year-old boys on a journey in 1950s America that lasts only ten days.
Choosing 1954 was not about documenting that year’s events. Towles wanted his characters standing at a threshold: old enough to have been formed by postwar stability, young enough to be about to collide with everything that stability was concealing.
What you have in the mid fifties is sort of a moment of quietude, as it were, after this tumultuous 20 years. And further... a whole series of major cultural events for America are about to happen.
Age eighteen interested him as a structural concept before it interested him as a subject. The ten-day compression of the novel is a direct consequence of what he believes that age means: not simply youth, but the first moment when a person owns the terms of their own formation.
Sometime around sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, we all have this moment of recognition where we say, you know, actually, all these things I’ve been told, I don’t have to accept any of it. I have both the liberty and the responsibility to make decisions about all those things myself. [paraphrased from audio]
How he wrote it
Route X becomes a road with a nameTowles outlines his novels chapter by chapter before writing a single scene, and the purpose of that discipline is not control but release. Knowing the facts in advance means his conscious mind can stand aside during the actual writing.
Having the structure and planning in place, it means that when I’m entering a chapter, I am not using that portion of my mind to decide what’s going to happen... Instead, because I know all those factual components, I can allow my subconscious to be entirely in charge of the way in which the chapter is going to sound... the imagery that’s going to be used, language, metaphor, allegory, all that is coming out of my subconscious and my poetic sensibility.
The novel’s countdown structure, now one of its most distinctive formal features, was not part of the original plan. Towles had labeled sections ‘Day One,’ ‘Day Two,’ ‘Day Three’ through the first half of the draft before he noticed what the accumulation of days was actually doing.
I suddenly realized that the book wasn’t simply a story told over the course of ten days, it was a countdown.
He renamed the sections ‘Ten,’ ‘Nine,’ ‘Eight,’ intending to restore the original titles at the end. He never did. Once the draft was finished, he decided readers deserved to feel the same pressure he had felt while writing it: the story was not open-ended, it was ticking.
The book’s title came from an accident of cartography. Towles had spent several drafts referring to the route his characters would take as ‘Route X,’ a placeholder that assumed a road existed without knowing which one. The actual discovery happened when he finally opened a map.
My third novel The Lincoln Highway was originally entitled Unfinished Business... In all of my notes, I referred to the route they took as ‘Route X’. After several drafts, I opened up a map of the United States, peered at the middle of Nebraska, trying to figure out which exact road they would have taken to California when I discovered Route 30.
Route 30, running from Times Square to San Francisco since 1913 under its original name, turned out to carry historical and thematic weight that Towles had not planned for. The road did not just name the book; it rewrote parts of it.
Once I learned the history of the highway — and that it extended from Times Square to San Francisco — I couldn’t believe my luck. Almost immediately, the Lincoln Highway reinforced or reshaped a number of the book’s themes and events.
His approach to point of view followed a similar pattern: an original plan overturned by what the characters themselves required. He had designed the book to alternate between just two narrators, Emmett in third person and Duchess in first, but other characters refused to be seen only through borrowed eyes. In the Friends and Fiction interview, he described realizing that Sally’s voice was too fully formed in his head to filter through anyone else’s account, and that Woolly’s inner world was the only real key to understanding him. [paraphrased from audio]
At this point, I can’t imagine this book being from the perspectives of only Duchess and Emmett. There’s no question in my mind, it would be a far less interesting book to both write and read.
His research comes at the end rather than the beginning, and its purpose is to find details, not to build expertise. He read the front pages of the New York Times for each of his story’s ten days and, on June 14, 1954, found a notice that all activity in New York City would stop the following day for ten minutes as part of a nuclear attack drill. He turned to June 15th and found a photograph of Times Square, nearly empty.
Now, this is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard! At this point, the novel is written... So I think, this is a gift. It doesn’t change everything, but it provides a new little detail.
He added a chapter in which Woolly reads old headlines, and the empty Times Square photograph became part of the story. The sequence is a precise illustration of his research philosophy: the draft comes first, and then reality is allowed in, selectively.
That philosophy extends to how he thinks about the relationship between fiction and historical fact. He is not trying to reconstruct the period; he is using it as a setting in the way a painter uses a backdrop.
History is the painted backdrop. I really don’t care that it be very precise. It should not be very precise. It’s not hyper-realism. It should be impressionist.
The personal thread
His father’s age, and what that cost himThe connection between the novel’s characters and his own family became visible to Towles only after he finished the first draft, when the arithmetic of the setting suddenly caught up with him.
When I was done with the first draft, I thought the characters in this story are 18. It is 1954, that is actually about the time my father would have been 18! My father died a few years ago, so you can interpret that as you will.
He has consistently described his characters as inventions rather than self-portraits, but he acknowledges that the membrane between his fiction and his life is not perfectly sealed. The comment about his father is the clearest instance in his public remarks on this book where a personal fact visibly bent the work.
My characters are all inventions but every now and then something from my life will sneak into my work.
On what the book is wrestling with
Where a personal code comes fromEmmett Watson, the novel’s protagonist, and Duchess, his antagonist, grew up in circumstances nearly as different as two American lives can be, and the novel sets them moving in the same direction to see whether origin determines outcome. Towles frames the underlying question in terms of moral formation rather than morality itself.
I’m interested in the question of where this personal ethos comes from. To what degree does it spring from our community — from the shared traditions and mores that define our clan? Do our parents serve as an influence, or counter-influence in its formation? Does part of our ethos come to us in the form of stories, whether handed down or read in books?
Towles resists the idea that a novel should settle into a single fixed meaning, and he treats it as evidence of a book working correctly when different readers find different centers of gravity. A friend read the novel and reported that money was obviously one of its central themes. The observation stopped him.
This hadn’t occurred to me for one second!
He presents the surprise not as an oversight but as the intended condition of the book. The novel plants patterns it does not announce, and the reader is meant to be the one who names them.
He makes the same point about the imagery that accumulates across the book’s pages: timepieces, unusual cases, tables and desks, objects that appear and reappear without being flagged as symbols. Towles describes noticing them only after the draft was finished.
One of the pleasures of writing fiction is discovering upon completion of a project that some thread of imagery has run through the work without your complete awareness — forming, in essence, an unintentional motif.
What he wants us to sit with
A road that doesn’t resolveHe has described the ending of ‘The Lincoln Highway’ as deliberately open, and noted that it mirrors the ending of ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’ in a specific formal way he has identified but refuses to explain. Readers who have finished both books will know what he means, and he expects them to work it out without his help. His research philosophy and his closing philosophy point in the same direction: he believes in withholding.
I’m not a research guy. I don’t pick a topic, research it, and write a book. What I do is pick a topic that I feel very comfortable writing about because I have some affinity or deep knowledge... I’m very skeptical about how research will affect my work. I think that applied research toward a project can often feel that way to the reader — it feels like a researched book.