Bill Bryson - Notes From A Big Country: Journey into the American Dream

Bill Bryson

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NOTES FROM A BIG COUNTRY A BLACK SWAN BOOK: 9780552997867

First published in Great Britain in 1998 by Doubleday a division of Transworld Publishers Black Swan edition published 1999

Copyright Bill Bryson 1998 Illustrations by Alan Baker

The articles in this book first appeared in the Mail on Sundays Night & Day magazine between 6 October 1996 and 17 May 1998.

Bill Bryson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is a work of non-fiction.

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Bill Bryson is one of the funniest writers alive. For the past two decades he has been entertaining readers with bravura displays of wit and wisdom. His first book, The Lost Continent, in which he put small town America under the microscope, was an instant classic of modern travel literature. Although he has returned to America many times since, never has he been more funny, more memorable, more acute than in his most recent book, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, in which he revisits that most fecund of topics, his childhood. The trials and tribulations of growing up in 1950s America are all here. Des Moines, Iowa, is recreated as a backdrop to a golden age where everything was good for you, including DDT, cigarettes and nuclear fallout. This is as much a story about an almost forgotten, innocent America as it is about Brysons childhood. The past is a foreign country. They did things differently then

Bill Brysons bestselling travel books include The Lost Continent, Notes from a Small Island, A Walk in the Woods and Down Under. A Short History of Nearly Everything was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, and won the Aventis Prize for Science Books and the Descartes Science Communication Prize. His latest book is his bestselling childhood memoir, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid.

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I am deeply indebted to the following people for various expressions of kindness, patience, generosity and drink: Simon Kelner and all his dear, wonderful colleagues on Night & Day, including Tristan Davies, Kate Carr, Ian Johns, Rebecca Carswell and Nick Donaldson; Alan Baker for his ever-droll and inventive illustrations to the column; Patrick Janson-Smith, Marianne Velmans, Alison Tulett, Larry Finlay, Katrina Whone and Emma Dowson, among many, many others, at Transworld Publishers; my agent Carol Heaton; my old pal David Cook for yet another brilliant jacket; Allan Sherwin and Brian King for letting me write columns when I should have been doing work for them; and above all way above all my wife, Cynthia, and children, David, Felicity, Catherine and Sam, for so graciously letting me drag them into all this.

And a special thanks to little Jimmy, whoever he may be.

In the late summer of 1996 Simon Kelner, who is both an old friend and an exceptionally nice fellow, rang me up in New Hampshire and asked me if I would write a weekly column about America for the Mail on Sundays Night & Day magazine, to which he had recently been appointed editor.

At various times over the years Simon had persuaded me to do all kinds of work that I didnt have time to do, but this was way out of the question.

No, I said. I cant. Im sorry. Its just not possible.

So can you start next week?

Simon, you dont seem to understand. I cant do it.

We thought wed call it Notes from a Big Country.

Simon, youll have to call it Blank Space at the Start of the Magazine because I cannot do it.

Great, he said, but a trifle absently. I had the impression that he was doing something else at the time reviewing models for a swimsuit issue would be my guess. In any case, he kept covering up the phone and issuing important editor-type instructions to other people in the vicinity.

So well send you a contract, he went on when he came back to me.

No, Simon, dont do that. I cant write a weekly column for you. Its as simple as that. Are you taking this in? Simon, tell me you are taking this in.

Wonderful. Im so pleased. Well, must run.

Simon, please listen to me. I cant do a weekly column. Just not possible. Simon, are you listening? Simon? Hello? Simon, are you there? Hello? Bugger.

So here are seventy-eight columns from the first eighteen months of Notes from a Big Country. And the thing is, I really didnt have time for this.

I once joked in a book that there are three things you cant do in life. You cant beat the phone company, you cant make a waiter see you until hes ready to see you, and you cant go home again. For the last seventeen months I have been quietly, even gamely, reassessing point number three.

A year ago last May, after nearly two decades in England, I moved back to the States with my wife and children. Returning home after such an absence is a surprisingly unsettling business, a little like waking from a long coma. You quickly discover that time has wrought changes that leave you feeling mildly foolish and out of touch. You proffer hopelessly inadequate sums when making small purchases. You puzzle over vending machines and pay-phones, and are quite astounded to discover, by means of a stern grip on your elbow, that gas station road maps are no longer free.

In my case, the problem was intensified by the fact that I had left as a youth and was returning in middle age. All those things one does as an adult take out mortgages, have children, accumulate pension plans, develop an interest in household wiring I had only ever done in England. Things like furnaces and screened windows were, in an American context, the preserve of my father.