An Exclusive Guest Post from Amor Towles, Author of The Lincoln Highway

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.

The reason I make a shift like this is because it forces me to retool almost every element of my craft. By changing the setting, the era, and the cast of characters, I also must change the narrative’s perspective, tone, and poetics so that they will be true to these people in this situation at this moment in time. Similarly, by changing the duration of the tale—from a year to thirty years to ten days—the structure, pacing, and scope of thematic discovery all have to change.

I always start with a very simple idea, a conceit that has popped into my head and which can be described in a sentence. In the years that follow, I’ll keep returning to the idea, picturing the characters, the settings, the events, eventually filling a few notebooks while slowly gaining an understanding of the story as a whole. So, when I sit down to write the first chapter of a book, I’ve spent years imagining it already. (The adjacent photograph shows some of the notebooks I used for The Lincoln Highway including one from July 2014 with the book’s original working title Unfinished Business.)

Generally, I can remember where I was when I had the initial notion for a book. With Rules of Civility I was at a friend’s house on Long Island in 1990 looking at a collection of the portraits that Walker Evans had taken with a hidden camera on the New York City subways in the late thirties. With A Gentleman in Moscow, I was walking into a hotel in Geneva in 2008. In the case of The Lincoln Highway, I have no idea where I was or what I was doing. 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 ready to begin his life anew only to discover that two of his fellow inmates have stowed away in the warden’s car.

This premise could have been realized in many different decades. So, why did I decide to set my story in 1954? Simply put, I find this moment in American history fascinating, but less for what was happening than for what was about to happen.

With the Korean War having concluded in July 1953, America was at peace in 1954; but the country’s entanglement in the Vietnam War was about to begin. Although America didn’t ramp up its full military presence in Vietnam until 1965, in November 1955, President Eisenhower deployed the Military Assistance Advisory Group. These were the American military personnel we sent to train North Vietnamese armed forces. It was the first step that would eventually lead to our full involvement in the war.

The battle for civil rights in America is as old as the Union itself, but in 1954, the modern civil rights movement was about to begin. On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, initiating the end of legal segregation and the concept of “separate but equal,” at least on paper. In the decade that followed would come Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her bus seat and the resulting Montgomery Bus Boycott led by Martin Luther King (1955), the lunch counter protests (1960), the Freedom Riders (1961), the March on Washington (1963), and countless other public actions culminating in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In 1954, the “sexual revolution” was about to begin. It was in December 1953 that Hugh Heffner published the first issue of Playboy with an old nude of Marilyn Monroe serving as its centerfold—launching a new era of publicly acceptable pornography. That same year, the Kinsey Report on female sexuality was released, bringing private discussions of bedroom behavior into the public square. But the revolution would really take off when the Pill was approved in 1961, giving women and men the ability to engage in sexual activity with less concern over long term repercussions.

In 1954, television and rock & roll, two of the greatest cultural influences of the 20th century, were about to take off. In 1950, there were only one million households in the US with a television set. By 1954, that had grown to 30 million and by 1959, 88% of US households would have at least one set. In those first ten years of television many of the lasting formats and idioms of the medium were defined from the evening news broadcast to the sitcom and from the soap opera to the late-night talk show.

1954 saw the release of the first two hits of the Rock & Roll era: “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” by Big Joe Turner and “Rock around the Clock” by Bill Hailey and the Comets. (“Rock Around the Clock” would have a particularly large impact when it was chosen to accompany the opening credits of the 1955 movie The Blackboard Jungle, a drama about an inner-city high school, starring the young Sidney Poitier.) To give some sense of the world at the time, the top thirty songs at the end of 1953 according to Billboard included the likes of Nat King Cole, Patti Page, Eddie Fisher, Tony Bennett and three songs by Perry Como. Which is to say that pop music before 1954 was a crooners’ game. Fifteen years later, the Billboard charts would be dominated by the likes of the Beatles, the Doors, the Rolling Stones, Steppenwolf, and Sly & the Family Stone.

While Rock & Roll is often referenced as a complement to the rise in youth culture in America, I would argue that it was a fundamental cause of the modern youth movement. At no point in prior history did teenagers anywhere in the world have an effective means by which they could share their perspectives with each other. Rock & Roll was an art form created and performed by young people for young people with their own experiences, hopes, and complaints as its principle subject matter. Rock & Roll was the first public forum in which the young could assemble, express themselves, and rally each other in support of their own priorities. But as I say, all of this was about to happen.

So, while the great cultural shifts that defined America from 1955 to 1970 were not yet dominating the headlines in 1954, they were simmering just below the surface.

From a personal standpoint, I suppose my interest in the mid 1950s also stems from the fact it was the era when my father was on the verge of adulthood. Although my father was not a farm boy or the silent type, like Emmett he was a Midwesterner born during the Depression and raised during the Second World War. Like Emmett he turned eighteen at a time of peace and economic prosperity and before the advents of rock and roll, the sexual revolution, and the new era of social upheaval. In other words, the American landscape that my father began to navigate as an eighteen-year-old was the American landscape that Emmett is navigating in the novel. Upon finishing the book, I realized that Emmett’s and my father’s timeline was so similar, I went back and changed Emmett’s birth date to be my father’s: December 12, 1935.