As early as 1915, a wide array of writers embraced the possibility of the open road, contrary to what would seem to be the domination of the genre by white male writers. This class will examine road trip narratives by American writers of various race, gender, and social classes, proposing the road trip itself as a literary fragment whose mobilization as a means to reach community can expand our scope of this iconic genre. By bringing to light the multiplicity of road trip novels and the different ways they employ or deploy a road trip in their pages, we will examine how writers from different backgrounds employ the road trip to rethink racialized and gendered encounters. The 20th- and 21st- century texts in this class include novels that are not popularly associated with the road trip novel as a genre, but that are tied by the thread of community building and generic unconventionality that pulls these texts together. Through fiction, history, and literary theory readings we will reconsider the road trip genre as a narrative of emotive and transformative affective experiences that structure community building on the move.