The Air-Conditioned Nightmare

Miller returned to the United States in 1940, after twelve years in Europe, and did not want to be back. With an advance for a book about rediscovering America, he set out from New York in October 1940 in a secondhand 1932 Buick, having only just gotten his driver's license, and spent the next year on the road: the South, New Orleans, the Southwest, the Pacific coast. For stretches of the drive his companion was the painter Abraham Rattner.

The book alternates between attack and admiration. Miller argued that American life had been organized around sales and comfort at the cost of everything he valued; the title phrase is his summary of it. Against that he set the people he met who seemed to him to be living real lives — painters, craftsmen, small-town originals — and the landscape itself, which he wrote about with awe. He finished the manuscript by 1942, but a book this hostile to American life could not appear in wartime; New Directions published it in 1945.

Miller leaves New York in October 1940 and drives south: Virginia, the Carolinas, New Orleans, Natchez, the Ozarks, then the Grand Canyon, the desert, and California. The chapters alternate between criticism of the cities and factories he passes through and portraits of the people who impress him — painters, preachers, drifters, craftsmen.

The question he keeps asking, at diners and gas stations across the country, is what all of it is for. His answer — that America had traded living for the machinery of living — was finished by 1942 and published in 1945, just as the country won the war.