In the spirit of our founding father, Mark Twain, County Highway is honoring the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence by gathering a raft of some of America’s finest essayists, humorists, fiction writers, and other prose stylists and wise-asses to remind us of what makes America great. The answers, some deadpan, and others only mildly tongue-in-cheek, include lawn-mowers, gas grills, Hanna-Barbera cartoons, cowboy boots, catcher’s mitts, light-bulbs, hairspray, chicken-wire fencing, and 242 other entries in what is sure to be the most amusing and least-tiresome tribute to a nation that occasionally commemorates the past by staging gaudy parades or engaging in bouts of solemn introspection but thrives most of the time on forgetting its history and making new stuff.
Given the bitter political divisions that render Americans capable of agreeing on anything of importance, we don’t claim to list the “greatest” American things, nor do we rank them in any order besides the alphabetical. Rather, the greatness of each entry will speak for itself, and for the nation that we have built together — by solving problems that needed solving, through flashes of off-kilter genius and intuition, and by kidding around.
CONTRIBUTORS:
Tony Badran, Ryan Baesemann, Drew Bratcher, Kaitlan Bui, Cyrus Coron, J.D. Daniels, John Demeny, Johnny Dwyer, Lucy Ellis, Anne Fadiman, Matthew Fishbane, Gary Fisketjon, Clementine James Ford, Amanda Fortini, Clayton Sheldon Fox, Ian Frazier, Chandler Fritz, Meaghan Garvey, David Gates, Lazo Gitchos, Wade Graham, Aaron Gwyn, Emily Hamilton, Sterling HolyWhiteMountain, Tama Janowitz, Lee Clay Johnson, Jacob Kaplan, Josh Kaufman, Walter Kirn, Maisie Kirn, Valen Lambert, Liel Leibovitz, Kurt Loder, Kevin Lozano, David Mikics, Farahn Morgan, Jefferson Morley, Bruce Murkoff, Alana Newhouse, Krist Novoselic, Gus O’Connor, Alex Perez, Jonah Raskin, Noah Rawlings, Armin Rosen, Donald Rosenfeld, David Samuels, Susannah Samuels, Jim Shepard, Bud Smith, Charlie Smith, Ho-Ming So, J.J. Solari, Gerry Stanek, Sandy Sternshein, Daniel Talamantes, Michele Thomas, Peter Trachtenberg, Jeff Weiss, and Sasha Wiseman.
County Highway is a magazine about America in the form of a 19th-century newspaper. It features reports on the political and spiritual crises that are gripping our country and their deeper cultural and historical sources; regular columns about agriculture, civil liberties, animals, herbal medicine, and living off the grid, mentally and physically; essays about literature and art; and an entire section devoted to music.
David Samuels is editor and co-founder of County Highway. He had a long career as a staff and contract writer for The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, The Point, and other magazines, on subjects including dog tracks, music festivals, blimp pilots, serial impostors, jewel thieves, pigeon racing, and the art of bringing down large buildings with explosives. He also reported on wars in the Balkans and the Middle East, where he learned the importance of gun safety. He is currently restoring a gold 1985 Porsche 924 that he bought off a guy who found it in a barn. He is married to Alana Newhouse, County Highway’s Classifieds Editor.
Walter Kirn is a fiction writer, essayist, critic, and editor-at-large of County Highway. His novels include Up in the Air and Thumbsucker, both of which were made into major feature films. His essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper's, and countless other publications. His latest book is Blood Will Out, a memoir.
Anne Fadiman is an essayist and reporter. Her most recent book, The Wine Lover’s Daughter, is a memoir about her father, wine, and the upsides and downsides of upward mobility. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, her account of the crosscultural conflicts between a Hmong family and the American medical system, won a National Book Critics Circle Award.
Ian Frazier writes essays, humor pieces, and books of travel, memoir, and human geography. He has won the Thurber Prize for American Humor twice, and on May 21, 2004, he won The Glenlivet Manhattan Cup for the Largest Bluefish Caught on a Fly. He lives in New Jersey.
