President Eisenhower signed the Federal Aid Highway Act in 1956, launching construction of the 77,000 km Interstate Highway System — the largest civil engineering project in US history — designed to allow coast-to-coast driving at 110 km/h.

The interstate was the physical infrastructure of Beat literature; Kerouac's On the Road (1957) was shaped by the new highway culture, and an entire American poetic tradition of road poetry — from Frank O'Hara to Gary Snyder — drew on the democratic mobility the system promised.