In college, they studied comparative mythology before dropping out their last semester to learn about the world on its own terms. The sons of working class heroes and housewives, the progeny of the locomotive and Eisenhower’s highway, they lit out across America in search of America, losing themselves in the process, on the way, typing long poems on adding machines, whose lines stretched the short fast length of the tape to the other side. At the end of it, someone typed it up, bound it in a book with a blank cover. It was the Great American Novel. No one ever asked what it was called, only those who didn’t know better asked why it was written at all.