easy rider essay

A Rabbit's Foot

Easy Rider and the Counterculture

January 31, 2023 . BY Peter Bradshaw

The Guardian’s film critic explores how Easy Rider became the movie of the sixties counterculture.

On its sensational release in 1969, Dennis Hopper’s biker-freak odyssey Easy Rider became a touchstone for the American counterculture, the locus classicus of freedom, the New Testament of sticking it to the man. This movie is perhaps the counterculture’s single most prominent and enduring visual legacy. And now—to the dismay of Easy Rider fans—there is even excitable talk of a remake.

You ask—what was the counterculture? It’s these guys on their Harleys, roaming around, having encounters, smoking weed, dropping acid! They were literally on the ultimate ‘trip’, and their freedom spoke to young Americans who had dropped out and were travelling around from festival to festival, or heading up to Canada to avoid the Vietnam draft. Author Terry Southern, and stars Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda, argued over their script credits, but screenwriter Buck Henry said that “ Easy Rider was authorless, the automatic handwriting of the counterculture.”

It’s complicated, though. Easy Rider is a story of white people, when the counterculture was driven by black American activists’ fight against racism; it’s also about two guys who (like the counterculture itself perhaps) had no great interest in the burgeoning feminism of the time. And in so many ways it’s a story of ruthless capitalism and entrepreneurialism: two selfish drug dealers who abandon their murdered friend by the roadside because they don’t want to get the cops involved and are finally haunted by the truth, before their own brutal fate—they’re sellouts. And yet this final tragic contradiction is what makes it so countercultural. Easy Rider is Woodstock and Altamont at the same time. It’s a festival of freedom and love, and it’s also about bikers, disillusion and death.

Two freaks from the US show up in a remote Mexican town: the dishevelled and hairy Billy (played by the movie’s director, co-writer and legendary substance imbiber, Dennis Hopper) and Wyatt, nicknamed “Captain America” due to the American flag on the back of his jacket: a smoother figure played by the impossibly handsome Peter Fonda. They buy a very great deal of cocaine at a knockdown wholesale rate from the locals and the next thing you know, our two amigos are in the car park at the airport in LA selling their wares at a gigantic markup to a sinister figure played (with an appropriateness that they can’t really have known at the time) by Phil Spector. It is at this point, in almost any other kind of film, that these naïve hippies would be cut out of the action or murdered.

But flush with cash and freedom and excitement, high on their own glorious audacity, and riding a couple of amazing new Harley choppers, Billy and Captain America head out on the highway, looking for adventure, as Steppenwolf put it in their immortal tune on the soundtrack, Born To Be Wild . (Steppenwolf later released a countercultural concept album called Monster ). Easy Rider was the first movie to use rock tracks on the soundtrack in this way, including work from Jimi Hendrix and The Byrds. Captain America has already thrown away his wristwatch, utterly unconcerned about bourgeois timetables and schedules. They are to have many startling meetings, most importantly with a groovy civil rights lawyer and boozer whom they introduce to weed: George Hanson, played by Jack Nicholson.

Easy Rider didn’t come out of a clear blue sky. The spirit of the times was turbulent, volcanic, revolutionary. In the previous two years, there had been a student uprising in Paris, the killing of Che Guevara in the Bolivian jungle, racist murders in Birmingham, Alabama (and all over the United States), the Prague spring and the Soviet tanks, upheavals in Hungary and Poland, uproar in Communist China and post-independent African states, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and Robert Kennedy. And in Hollywood, executives were panicking about the sclerotic dullness of the studio system, the dull fare being pumped out, the increasing importance of the youth customer base. The vitality of the New American Cinema showed them a new type of American movie was possible—particularly with the (eventual) success of Warren Beatty’s Bonnie And Clyde . Billy and Captain America were like Bonnie And Clyde’s runaway road-movie outlaws—only they didn’t have guns.

Easy Rider would have reassured the old guard in that it already fitted (roughly) into existing templates: it was a biker movie (like The Wild One with Marlon Brando), and these were famously lucrative. And it looked a bit like a Western, with bikes instead of horses. But it was also a kind of buddy movie, a movie about male friendship (like Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid ). And weirdly enough, the zany, freaky adventures of Billy and Captain America resonated with something at the forefront of the American mind: the notorious disorder at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, at which the two activist-pranksters of the Youth International Party (the “Yippies”) became prominent: Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman—political subversives, anti-Vietnam radicals and creative mischief artists who excelled in devising demonstrations and situationist freakouts. Billy and Captain America were Yippies in their hearts, albeit unknowingly, in they create mayhem—more so than than a wacky troupe called Gorilla Theater they encounter in a hippy commune—and flout the law. But they wish violence on no-one.

But there is another way in which Easy Rider created a backdated countercultural history. Clearly, one of the great radical figures was Che Guevara. But it was long after his death, in 1993, that a Cuban publisher brought out his twenty-something memoir of travelling across South America with a friend, Alberto Granada, in 1952, finding the poverty and inequality which radicalised him— The Motorcycle Diaries . They only had one bike, a 500cc Norton. But who could doubt what inspired this posthumous publication? What created a huge retrospective part of the Che Guevara myth? Its English publisher Verso marketed it under the tagline: ‘Das Kapital meets Easy Rider.’ Guevara died a year before the film came out—but found himself entwined with Easy Rider . And so Easy Rider rode on its radical and countercultural future.

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There aren’t many films that encapsulate an era as perfectly as Easy Rider . It was released in 1969, the final year in one of the most important decades for American culture. It was a time of great social reform, with campaigns such as the civil rights movement and second-wave feminism finally achieving the legislative and cultural victories they had been searching for. The increasingly counterculture youth — spurred on by musicians like Bob Dylan and filmmakers like Arthur Penn — sought to upheave centuries-old notions they deemed unfit for a modernizing world, and with the charismatic John F. Kennedy leading the charge, it seemed they were going to get everything they wanted. But dreams are easier dreamt than realized, and the decade’s final years were besmudged by upheaval and unrest, brought on by an escalating war in Vietnam and the assassination of many of its great leaders. What started with the promise of a new golden age ended with a nation in turmoil, and as the sun set one last time on the decade that JFK had once dubbed as the “New Frontier," few mourned its passing.

It’s amidst this backdrop that we’re introduced to Wyatt ( Peter Fonda ) and Billy ( Dennis Hopper ), the freewheeling motorcyclists at the heart of Easy Rider . They spend their days riding through the American South on a pair of trusted Harley-Davidson choppers, oblivious to the troubles of the modern world. Our first encounter with them says it all. They’ve just finished smuggling cocaine from Mexico to Los Angeles and earned themselves a large sum of cash in the process. With their spirits high and their pockets loaded, they set off to the tune of Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild," a song that so perfectly embodies their personalities it feels like it was written specifically for them. Their destination is the Mardi Gras festival in New Orleans. What they’ll do with themselves afterwards never crosses their minds, nor do they have much of a plan about getting there beyond driving east and hoping for the best. Wyatt and Billy are not people to think ahead — they’re outlaws who live for the moment, and what starts as a simple trek across 2,000 miles of untamed land becomes a platform with which to explore this crucial period of American history. Easy Rider captured the mood of its era so flawlessly that viewing it today feels akin to sifting through a time capsule from a bygone age — a result that makes it a fascinating film to return to.

Outsiders Who Were Born to Be Wild

The central part of Easy Rider’s appeal came from its outsider sensibilities, both in the way it was made and the film itself. For context, the 1960s was not a good decade for Hollywood, with studios beginning to realize that the ridged and producer-driven style that had served them so well in the past had little appeal to a more cynical and free-spirited audience that was quickly becoming their main demographic. Films like Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate helped to kickstart the change that would result in New Hollywood (the dominant method of filmmaking in the 1970s, characterized by a more liberal use of taboo subjects and a greater emphasis on directors), but such seismic changes do not happen overnight. While this was occurring, Peter Fonda was gaining a reputation as a leading figure in the counterculture movement , thanks to his starring roles in various Roger Corman films like The Wild Angels and The Trip , just two of the innumerable low-budget films hoping to entice the audience that tentpole films had turned away. Their moderate success would prove influential when major studios began to make their own rebellious/psychedelic-infused movies, but accusations of inauthenticity leveled against the people behind them hindered their achievements.

RELATED: Summer Of Love: 10 Great Movies About Hippie Culture

It was here where Easy Rider excelled. While Fonda and Hopper (who served as producer and director, respectively, while also sharing screenwriting credit with Terry Southern ) considered making their film in cooperation with Corman, one high-tempered meeting was all it took to convince them to take the independent route. As a result, the duo had almost total control over the project, a result that saw Hopper achieving the freedom his onscreen counterpart spends the whole film searching for.

'Easy Rider' Taps an Untapped Market

This didn’t translate to the smoothest of shoots — neither Fonda nor Hopper had worked on the crew of a film before, and it didn’t take long for that lack of experience to show. But it gave Easy Rider an authenticity that none of its competitors had. This wasn’t a group of commercially-oriented filmmakers trying to appropriate trends that didn’t belong to them, but a ragtag team of amateurs with nothing on their minds but a passion to tell a story they believed in. Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate set the ball rolling, but when Easy Rider roared its way into theatres in the summer of ’69 on the back of a measly $400,000 budget and became one of the most profitable independent films ever made, it was clear Hollywood would never be the same again.

The absence of studio heads funneling every aspect of production through the filter of test screenings and box office viability gave Easy Rider a unique feel unlike anything audiences had previously experienced. Wyatt and Billy (and the actors playing them) ingest a liberal amount of marijuana on their journey east, but while other films would denounce such actions as immoral, here it’s barely commented on. Integral aspects of the hippie subculture like free love and a communal lifestyle are treated in the same way, and while it doesn’t outright promote this way of life, it doesn’t feel like that was Hopper’s intention anyway. Instead, he just wants to present a version of America that reflects reality, away from the sanitized version that Hollywood had become so fixated on. Easy Rider was among the first films to include such plot points without also feeling the need to become a public information lecture about why they were bad, with Hopper preferring to let his audience decide their own opinion on such matters — a radical move in an age where the lingering effects of the Production Code still haunted when Hollywood studios would and wouldn’t do.

Wyatt and Billy Are the Perfect Protagonists

But this approach would have been meaningless without Wyatt and Billy leading the charge. They’re the perfect protagonists for a film like this, and it’s hard to imagine anyone in 1969 not relating to their unflinching rejection of societal norms. Both are at their happiest when civilization is but a blip on the horizon, and the elongated scenes of them riding through the American outback with nothing but the wind in their hair and the sun on their backs presents a serene image that would enthrall anyone. But such a life is not a sustainable one, and their inevitable pit stops to a "decent" way of living are treated like getting an injection — an ordeal that must still be endured. The places they visit display an uncomfortable mix of conservative and progressive ideals, giving the impression of a country at the threshold of an intersection it’s only half committed to cross. Wyatt and Billy like these towns just as much as the towns like them, and even though they mean no harm as they pass through, society is keen to take its revenge.

It's during one such visit that they’re thrown in jail for “parading without a permit," reducing the bikers who live only for the open road to a pair of rats in a cage, beholden to the law they’ve tried so hard to escape. Tired from arguing with the guards, Wyatt uses his American flag jacket as a pillow, a quiet act of rebellion that’s just one of many that Hopper sneaks into his film. The ultimate symbol of freedom is now just as confined as the people it’s supposed to serve, a subtle jab that would have delighted a 1969 viewer. It’s in this scene that we’re introduced to George ( Jack Nicholson ), an ACLU lawyer who briefly joins them in their pursuit of liberty, speaking Easy Rider’s most defining words in the process: “They’re not scared of you. They’re scared of what you represent." Wyatt and Billy are not the kind of people to attach labels to themselves, and would probably reject their status as counterculture heroes if they caught a glimpse into the real world, but the truth is they’re part of something far greater. They’re at the heart of a culture war that’s still going strong today, and if there’s one thing that all forms of establishment can unite in hating, it’s change.

A New Style of Filmmaking

That sentiment extends to the innovative ways Easy Rider told its story. The invisible editing and precise cinematography that has defined Classic Hollywood was ill-fitting for a tale such as this, resulting in a style that feels closer to the fragmented approach taken by the French New Wave. Jump cuts, abrupt shifts in time, jerky camera movements that look like they were improvised on the spot — all things that Old Hollywood loathed and New Hollywood cherished, so there’s no point asking which side Easy Rider was on. They help to simulate the psychedelic haze most of Easy Rider’s characters spend their lives in, while also giving the film the appearance of a half-remembered dream that foretells the editing style of later New Hollywood visionaries like Terrence Malick and John Cassavetes . It can be off-putting, but that’s the point, and it’s telling that this hyperactive style simmers down considerably when Wyatt and Billy are cruising down the backroads of a country they love as opposed to the built-up streets of a country they hate. Such experimental techniques were unheard of in mainstream films at the time, and Easy Rider’s success helped to cement their place in the language of American cinema.

It was recently reported that a reboot of Easy Rider was in the works , confirming the age-old belief that Hollywood will not let any property die a peaceful death so long as it still has name recognition. Quite what this film will look like (assuming it even happens) remains unclear, but a quote from one of its producers talks about building upon the work left by the original, allowing them to “give the youth of today a film that pays serious attention to their own countercultures and challenges." The implication is that it will be more of a spiritual successor than a straightforward remake, swapping out the 1960s for a contemporary setting that still retains the renegade tone of Hopper’s film. That would be the sensible way of approaching this project, but cinema is a vastly different beast than it was 50 years ago.

Easy Rider was an utterly singular film that could only have been made in a very specific timeframe by a very specific group of people, and trying to recapture that lightning in a bottle feels like following the letter rather than the spirit of the law. Still, it’s nice to see that its reputation as the definitive youth-oriented film continues to hold strong, and for those who have never had the opportunity to experience its hallucinatory portrayal of 1960s America, it’s well worth a look.

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Bear with me here as I recount a few facts about and plaudits for Easy Rider . A monumental landmark, Easy Rider has been the subject of hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of analysis. The film received a belated sequel in 2012 ( Easy Rider: The Ride Back , with none of the original actors or crew), and two documentaries have been devoted to its production history ( Born to Be Wild [1995] and Easy Rider: Shaking the Cage [1999]). In addition, Easy Rider was given a deluxe Criterion Collection release, which includes audio commentaries by Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, and Paul Lewis, the film’s production manager.

Easy Rider ’s premiere at the 1969 Cannes International Film Festival earned it the First Film Award; Jack Nicholson received a Best Actor in a Supporting Role Academy Award nomination; and Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Terry Southern shared an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay ( Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid won). In 1998, Easy Rider joined the “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” works on the U.S. National Film Registry. The American Film Institute’s “100 Years, 100 Movies” places it at No. 88 of all-time best American films.

I cite these statistics and acknowledgements because I’ve often heard the film dismissed as “that cool counterculture movie, nothing more” (“counterculture” used so often to define Easy Rider that it may as well be part of its name). But this film is so much more in film history, both for its cinematic style and for its ability not just to express but to channel a milieu, a dissatisfaction — remember “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” — and a profound longing to escape. Everything!

Because I was there, permit me to take you back to what this film meant to those of us who lived its longing, who yearned desperately for sanity, change, happiness, peace. You’ll have your own experience of this film now; I was there then, and this film mattered in ways few films do.

For all the information available about Easy Rider — the builders of the motorcycles, the heated arguments over the screenplay (who wrote what and when), the production conflicts and crises, the yin and yang of the meditative Wyatt (an amazing Peter Fonda aka Wyatt Earp) and the volatile Billy (a frenetic Dennis Hopper, aka Billy the Kid), the improvised insults of the locals, and the other incredible minutiae — to me what distinguishes and elevates the film is the visceral experience of it.

On the release of Easy Rider , I was in graduate school in the University of Kansas’ English Department. Word spread quickly about the appeal of this unprecedented, thrillingly unique film. It hadn’t yet appeared in Lawrence, Kan., so my roommate and I made a pilgrimage to Kansas City, my friend’s home city. It was all we expected and more, a late-1960s confrontation with staid cultural values and restrictive dictates. The soundtrack accelerated and defined the momentum, especially Steppenwolf’s Born to Be Wild propelling the early, exhilarating escape to the open road. It and selections from the Band, the Byrds, Jimi Hendrix, and others replaced mind-numbing tedium with mind-expanding fantasies induced by the music.

Steppenwolf’s incantation — “Head out on the highway/Lookin’ for adventure” — catapulted motorcycle riders and film viewers into a rarefied register of unfettered, illusory escape. We felt one with the spirit, and to hell with the thesis paper, the Middle English course, and the TA responsibilities — especially all those essays needing grading. We were free — at least for 95 minutes and however long the spell lasted, which was a considerably extended period.

Stylistically, cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs devised exactly the technical presentation that complemented and enhanced the film’s appeal. Shot over 12 weeks on the road, the film was described by Kovacs as minimalist filmmaking. In New Wave King: The Cinematography of Laszlo Kovacs, ASC (2002), edited by Ray Zone, Kovacs says: “We had the motorcycles in one truck and all the camera and lighting gear in another. There was no room for a dolly. My camera car was a Chevy convertible with a plywood platform. The film looks spontaneous, but don’t let that fool you. We rehearsed and staged every scene, and I lit to establish the mood and setting.” He inserted flash-forwards, jump cuts, choppy transitions, several frames from one scene alternating with frames from the succeeding scene — all in the service of the psychedelic trip. And we left thrilled, stunned, and overwhelmed by the shocking ending, painfully yearning for us not “to blow it.”

On the occasion of the film’s 50-year anniversary, with memories flooding back over me with a surprising immediacy, the question is whether Easy Rider can possibly hold up. Have we succumbed to our comfortable lives 50 years on? Has Easy Rider ’s appeal considerably dimmed? Has life taken its toll on rebellious inclinations and dreams of independence or is there still that kernel of resistance and recall? Can the spirit of the time be revived and enjoyed as vicariously as we once did or is it now so foreign, so unusual, that its appeal has become anachronistic, all but elusive for contemporary viewers. The good news is that it does maintain its appeal. It still casts a spell. With energy and heart, it continues to project a doomed world of idyllic dreams that crash against reality, with the women as sexist props as objectionable now as then.

For fans of the film, I recommend the Criterion release with two audio commentaries (Hopper’s 2009 rambling discussion and Hopper, Fonda, and production manager Paul Lewis holding forth in 1995), a 1969 Cannes interview with Fonda and Hopper, and more. The Fonda/Hopper/Lewis commentary and readily available website articles detail numerous, fascinating bits of trivia on locations, Fonda’s hospital stay for pneumonia when the commune swimming dip was shot (hence Fonda’s presence all one shot close-ups done three weeks later), locals recruited as extras, the original ending, stories on the motorcycles purchase and theft, the “we blew it” being shot after the movie wrapped, etc.

As noted above, one of the most discussed and debated lines is Wyatt’s, “We blew it.” But having now re-watched this marvelous film four times, I’m haunted today by the exchange between George Hanson (Nicholson) and Billy (Hopper.) George astutely tells Billy, “They’re not scared of you. They’re scared of what you represent to them.” Billy repeats his belief that to those who revile them, “All we represent to them is somebody who needs a haircut,” echoing comments by the men at the diner. Billy responds: “Oh, no. What you represent to them is freedom. Freedom’s what it’s all about. . . But talking about it and being it, that’s two different things. It’s real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace. Don’t tell anybody that they’re not free, because they’ll get busy killing and maiming to prove to you that they are. They’re going to talk to you and talk to you about individual freedom. But they see a free individual, it’s going to scare them. Well, it don’t make them running scared. It makes them dangerous.”

Given today’s fraught political climate, events that have unfolded over the fifty years since Easy Rider ’s debut, this insightful observation about the contentious late ‘60s reaches powerfully to inform 2019. Fighting on, then and now, we can’t let anything dampen our enthusiasm or diminish our determination. Feeling this, I never fail to get an electric jolt when I hear “head out on the highway” or, admittedly, to feel a bit like Gatsby, my past regrettably receding.

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A cinematic snapshot of the ’60s

BORN TO BE WILD: Two disaffected bikers (Dennis Hopper, left, and Peter Fonda) head off in search of America in the buddy/road movie "Easy Rider" (1969), which made Jack Nicholson (playing straitlaced lawyer George Hanson, far right) a star.

Nobody went to see “Easy Rider” (1969) only once. It became one of the rallying-points of the late ’60s, a road picture and a buddy picture, celebrating sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, and the freedom of the open road. It did a lot of repeat business while the sweet smell of pot drifted through theaters. Seeing the movie years later is like opening a time capsule. It provides little shocks of recognition, as when you realize they aren’t playing “Don’t Bogart That Joint” for laughs.

Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper play Captain America and Billy, journeying cross-country on their motorcycles, using a drug deal in Los Angeles to finance a trip to Mardi Gras. The drug is cocaine (sold to a dealer played by rock producer Phil Spector ), but their drug of choice is marijuana. Billy gets the giggles around the campfire at night. Captain America, who could handle it better, is cool, quiet, remote, a Christ figure who flies the American flag on his gas tank, his helmet and the back of his leather jacket. (It would be a year later, after the release of “Joe,” that flag decals were co-opted by the right.)

The making of the movie became a Hollywood legend. Fonda and Hopper took their screenplay (co-written with Terry Southern ) to the traditional home of motorcycle movies, American-International Pictures. But Sam Arkoff turned them down, and they finally found funding at Columbia. The budget was so limited, there was no money for an original score, so Hopper, the director, slapped on a scratch track of rock ‘n’ roll standards for the first studio screening. The executives loved the sound and insisted the songs be left in, and “Easy Rider” begat countless later movies that were scored with oldies.

Motorcycle movies were not fashionable in 1969, although “ Hell's Angels on Wheels ” made an attempt in 1967 to break free of the booze-and-violence cliches. Directed by Richard Rush (“ The Stunt Man “), it was a largely overlooked precursor to “Easy Rider,” sharing the same cinematographer, Laszlo Kovacs , and even the same little-known actor in a colorful supporting role: Jack Nicholson , who played a gas station attendant named Poet. “Hell’s Angels on Wheels” is a great-looking movie, but it took “Easy Rider” to link two symbols of rebellion — motorcycles and the hippie counterculture — and catch the spirit of the time.

“Easy Rider” was playing in theaters at about the time Woodstock Nation was gathering in upstate New York. It plays today more as a period piece than as living cinema, but it captures so surely the tone and look of that moment in time. There’s heavy symbolism as Fonda throws away his wristwatch before setting off on the journey, and the establishing scenes, as Captain America and Billy stash their loot in a gas tank and set off down the backroads of the Southwest, are slowly paced — heavy on scenery, light on dialogue, pregnant with symbolism and foreboding.

One of their bikes needs work, and they borrow tools at a ranch, leading to a labored visual juxtaposition of wheel-changing and horse-shoeing. Then they have dinner with the weathered rancher and his Mexican-American brood, and Fonda delivers the first of many quasi-profound lines he will dole out during the movie: “It’s not every man who can live off the land, you know. You can be proud.” (The rancher, who might understandably have replied, “Who the hell asked you?” nods gratefully.)

A hitchhiker leads them to a hippie commune that may have seemed inspiring in 1969, but today looks banal. A “performance troupe” sings “Does Your Hair Hang Low?” on a makeshift stage, while stoned would-be hippie farmers wander across the parched earth, scattering seed. “Uh, get any rain here?” Billy asks. “Thank you for a place to make a stand,” Captain America says. The group leader gives the Captain and Billy a tab of acid and the solemn advice, “When you get to the right place, with the right people — quarter this.”

If “Easy Rider” had continued in the vein of its opening scenes, it’s a good question whether anyone would remember it today. The film comes alive with the electrifying entry of the Jack Nicholson character, a lawyer named George Hanson whom they meet in a jail cell. (They have been jailed for “parading without a permit” after wheeling their bikes into a small-town parade.)

Historic moments in the cinema are not always this easy to identify: Nicholson had been in movies for years, but his jailhouse dialogue in “Easy Rider” instantly made him a star. “You boys don’t look like you’re from this part of the country,” he says. He’s an alcoholic lawyer on good terms with the cops; he arranges their release, supplies the name of a topnotch whorehouse in New Orleans, and says that he’s started out for Mardi Gras many times without getting past the state line. That sets up the film’s most famous shot: George on the back of Billy’s motorcycle, wearing a football helmet.

Nicholson’s work in “Easy Rider” created a sensation. Audiences loved his sardonic, irreverent personality and were primed for his next film, “ Five Easy Pieces ” (1970), with its immortal chicken salad sandwich dialogue. Then and now, “Easy Rider” comes alive while the Nicholson character is in the movie. That night around the campfire, he samples grass for the first time (“Lord have mercy, is that what that is?”) and then explains his theory that extraterrestrials walk among us. He uses a confiding tone, sharing outrageous information as if he’s conferring a favor; it would become his trademark.

George is killed shortly afterward, by rednecks who have seen them in a roadside cafe and decide they look “like refugees from a gorilla love-in.” The impact of his death seems shortchanged in the movie, which hurries on to New Orleans.

Captain America and Billy find the legendary whorehouse and drop acid in the cemetery with two hookers (including Karen Black in one of her earliest film roles). It’s a bad trip, but maybe they chose the wrong place with the wrong people.

The last act of the movie is preordained. There have been ominous omens along the way (and even a brief flash-forward to Captain America’s flaming death). Rednecks in a pickup truck use a shotgun to blast both men from their bikes. The camera climbs high into the sky on a crane, pulling back to show us the inevitable fate, I guess, of anyone who dares to be different.

The symbolic deaths of heroes became common in movies after “ Bonnie and Clyde ” (1967), and Pauline Kael noted in her “Easy Rider” review that “the movie’s sentimental paranoia obviously rang true to a large, young audience’s vision. In the late ’60s, it was cool to feel that you couldn’t win, that everything was rigged and hopeless.”

One of the reasons that America inspires so many road pictures is that we have so many roads. One of the reasons we have so many buddy pictures is that Hollywood doesn’t understand female characters (there are so many hookers in the movies because, as characters, they share the convenience of their real-life counterparts: They’re easy to find and easy to get rid of.)

The motorcycle picture was a special kind of road/buddy movie that first came into view with Marlon Brando in “The Wild One” (1954), flourished in the late 1960s, and more or less disappeared a few years later. The movie grew out of pictures like “The Wild Angels” (1966, also starring Fonda), but it also expressed a notion that the counterculture believed in at the time: You could leave the city and return to more natural roots. A sweet idea, but one that did not coexist easily with drugs. In scenes like the one where Hopper and Fonda teach Nicholson how to inhale, there’s a quietly approving air, as if life is a treatable disease, and pot is the cure.

But Billy is paranoid, probably because of all the grass he smokes, and in later scenes, they’re oblivious to the dangers they invite with their strange appearance. (There’s a scene where they excite teenage girls in a restaurant with their aura of sexual danger, and local Good Old Boys feel threatened and plot revenge.)

Many deep thoughts were written in 1969 about Fonda’s dialogue in a scene the night before his death. Hopper is ecstatic because they’ve made it to their destination with their drug money intact. “We blew it,” Fonda tells him. “We blew it, man.” Heavy. But doesn’t the movie play differently today from the way its makers intended? Cocaine in 1969 carried different connotations from those of today, and it is possible to see that Captain America and Billy died not only for our sins, but also for their own.

This essay is based on my 1994 re-review of the film, revised for inclusion in the Great Movies series. My original review is online at rogerebert.com, where there are also reviews of the similarly themed films “Hell’s Angels on Wheels” and “The Wild Angels.”

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

• Peter Fonda as Wyatt
• Phil Spector as Connection
• Dennis Hopper as Billy
• Antonio Mendoza as Jesus
• Jack Nicholson as George Hanson

Screenplay by

• Dennis Hopper
• Peter Fonda
• Terry Southern

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This is the definitive counterculture blockbuster. The down-and-dirty directorial debut of former clean-cut teen star Dennis Hopper, Easy Rider heralded the arrival of a new voice in film, one pitched angrily against the mainstream. After the film’s cross-country journey—with its radical, New Wave–style editing, outsider-rock soundtrack, revelatory performance by a young Jack Nicholson, and explosive ending—the American road trip would never be the same.

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• Two audio commentaries, one from 2009, featuring actor-director-writer Dennis Hopper, and the other from 1995, featuring Hopper, actor-writer Peter Fonda, and production manager Paul Lewis
• Born to Be Wild (1995) and “Easy Rider”: Shaking the Cage (1999), documentaries about the making and history of the film
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The Movie “Easy Rider” From Sociology Essay

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Introduction

Structural functionalism, structural functionalism in easy rider, references list.

Whilst movies in most cases are taken in as entertainment tools, they are also educative. Moreover, apart from the dramatic aspects of movies, they integrate other aspects touching on different fields of study like psychology, sociology, and political science among other.

The movie Easy Rider is one such movie. Easy Rider has more than two bikers traveling from Southwest to Mardi Gras in New Orleans in search of freedom. In addition to its thrilling nature, it touches on some deep aspects of sociology viz. structural functionalism, conflict interactionism, and symbolic interactionism. However, this paper focuses on the structural functionalism aspect of this movie.

According to Parsons (1961), “structural functionalism implies that social institutions; collectively forming a social structure, function to maintain the harmony of the social whole” (18).

In society, there are constituents that work in concert with each other to achieve the nature of society, as it exists. Among these constituents are institutions, customs, traditions, and norms among others. These constituents are cohesive and none can exist in absence of the other. In Easy Rider, structural functionalism comes out clearly, as Wyatt and Bill take their ride to ‘freedom.’

To understand the application of structural functionalism in this movie, it is important to note some of its themes for they give meaning to the movie hence validating the actions that bring about structural functionalism. During the time when this movie was being written, America was grappling with the reality of corruption, violence, bigotry, paranoia, and conformism to some extent. Everyone was crying for freedom; no wonder, Bill and Wyatt set to find this elusive element of humanity.

In society, drug abuse and drug trafficking is a biting issue; however, the greatest question remains, how do these drugs come from producers to consumers? The most appropriate answer to this question is structural functionalism.

In society, there are structures that facilitate this process and this fact stands out clearly in Easy Rider. Wyatt and Billy smuggles cocaine from Mexico and takes it to Los Angeles. This scene answers the ‘how’ question in the mystery of drug trafficking. Wyatt and Bill form a critical ‘constituent’ in American society in terms of drug trafficking.

Well, as noted in the definition of structural functionalism, there has to be intermediaries and consumers of these drugs for the existence of a society stained with drug abuse and drug trafficking. Remember, without these intermediaries, these drugs would not reach the consumers; therefore, there would not be existence of drug abuse in the society. There may be drug trafficking but no drug abuse and this would nullify the validity of structural functionalism.

The intermediary in this business is a man (acted by Phil Spector). This man buys the trafficked cocaine from Wyatt and Bill and supplies it in the streets of Los Angeles. The structural functionality element is now complete at this point. The constituents here are drug traffickers (Wyatt and Bill), intermediary (Phil Spector), and consumers (residents of Los Angeles).

The result here is a society that is maculated with illegal drugs. The ‘harmony’ of society talked of in the definition of structural functionality is achieved and maintained. There are structures facilitating this process.

Different institutions are involved. First, the failure of authorities to guard borders plays a key role in this functionalism. As an institution, authorities facilitate drug trafficking from Mexico to Los Angeles. To complete the structural functionality presented by failure of this institution, Wyatt and Bill utilize that opportunity to traffic in cocaine.

On the other side, in Los Angeles, drug laws are lax and this gives Phil Spector easy time in peddling the cocaine. Once more, the authority as an institution, acts as a constituent in society that fosters structural functionality. Drug abusers on the other hand complete the harmony in this social structure of drug trafficking and abuse. As aforementioned, the societal constituents may be institutions, customs, traditions, and norms among others.

Despite the fact that drug laws are lax in Los Angeles, the culture of drug abuse is deeply rooted amongst residents of this place. In these constituents, there is no mention of human beings (people); however, people are the building blocks of all these constituents. For instance, from people there comes culture, customs, norms, and even institutions.

After Wyatt and Billy are arrested for “parading without a permit” (Fonda & Hopper), they find a lawyer in jail who helps them to get out. In society, jails would be of no use if there were no crimes. Likewise, lawyers would be irrelevant if there were no criminals to be defended in court. In society, the culture of hate and selfishness is prevalent.

Nevertheless, there has to be victims and villains of the same. As Wyatt, Bill and George have their early lunch in Louisiana, local men and police officers start mocking them with racist abuses. One of them is heard saying, “I don’t believe they’ll make the parish line” (Fonda & Hopper). This scene complements the theory of structural functionalism.

There has to be perpetrators of a given norm to give society its nature and function. American society as presented in this movie is racist, untrustworthy without freedom. George observes that, “This used to be a hell of a good country. I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with it…Americans talk a lot about the value of freedom, but are actually afraid of anyone who truly exhibits it” (Fonda & Hopper).

In other words, George is describing the status of affairs in America at this time. However, where does this form of society come from? One would ask. This form of society, void of freedom and pregnant with hate sprouts from the societal constituent of hate culture. The perpetrators of this hate culture are components of structural functionalism.

Finally, one would wonder how prostitution thrives in society. Again, structural functionality answers this question. Logically, prostitution could not thrive without ‘consumers’ and ‘suppliers.’ After reaching New Orleans, Wyatt, and Bill finds their way into a brothel and secures services of two prostitutes, Karen and Mary.

There are different institutions that are constituents of structural functionalism in this case. First, Wyatt and Bill are willing buyers while Karen and Mary are wiling sellers. This culminates into a business deal. Moreover, authorities have allowed the presence of this business while building industry has availed good structures for brothels. All these factors function in concert to give the result of a society marked with prostitution.

The movie, Easy Rider presents more than entertainment. It is educative and looked from a sociological perspective; one cannot fail to see the structural functionalism side of the movie. In society, there are structures that work in concert to maintain the harmony of society. Easy Rider gives such structures and shows their application.

For drug abuse to exist in society, there has to be producers, suppliers, and consumers. Wyatt and Bill are the ‘producers’ by virtue of bringing cocaine to Los Angeles, Phil Spector is the supplier while willing Los Angeles residents are consumers. In society, there are structures that function in concert to ensure harmony and existence of a given society and this defines structural functionality.

Fonda, P., & Hopper, D. (1969). Easy Rider. Columbia Pictures Corporation; New York.

Parsons, T. (1961). Theories of Society: Foundations of Modern Sociological Theory. Free Press, New York.

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Explanation of the ending of Easy Rider

This is regarding the 1969 classic Easy Rider . I found the ending was abrupt and very quick. Although throughout the movie it has been shown how society dislikes and avoids hippies like Wyatt and Billy, the end seemed unusual. Wasn't the shooting of both riders by some random truck drivers, a bit of a stretch? And that too when there was hardly any confrontation/conversation. Did they end Easy Rider abruptly or is there any subliminal message here?

• 1 Do you mean metaphorical message (vs. subliminal)? –  DA. Commented Jul 30, 2015 at 3:44
• Sorry not tending to point to any specific term. Just want to know the meaning and analysis of the ending scene. –  Ankit Commented Jul 30, 2015 at 5:29

2 Answers 2

It all comes full circle. At the begining Wyatt destroys his watch in pursuit of freedom as time only serves to constrain them. Throughout the journey they come across lots of people and ideas such as the hiker and his village he lives in, which is were Wyatt learns about himself and freedom. They enter the south and if you notice characters and ideas change completely, one being how in the south at that time they were not big on freedom and acceptance as people were earlier in their journey. This change is big when you see the lawyer get killed, showing that in the south they will do whatever they want to someone who is different.

At the end as you know they are killed by 2 random truckers; Billy first, making him a martyr. Wyatt is killed after this, learning earlier when he says "WE BLEW IT" saying that they missed there chance for happiness and true freedom. He realizes that death is the only way to truly be free and turns around and heads down the road to die.

This movie is about the capitalist ethic in America, analogous to capitalism being some sort of delusional, "spaced-out" road trip high. The very feeble and fragile looking machines they ride (the American dream) symbolize the war machine: American aggression and expansion having to turn back and not getting farther than the western shore, namely the Vietnam era (1960's) was a loss. We are at the end of the road for American freedom, and other nations are supposedly now on the move. The death scene at the end is symbolic of America turning inwards, into itself, losing hopes and dreams of further expansionism, and now turning inwards, America left to the ravages of bigotry, hate, and futile endeavors (and some strict German-looking guys in a pick-up truck...just a bunch of good ole boys from down south). America finds death awaits it: knowing Hollywood as we know Hollywood, the script was likely written by pessimists with foreign accents while drinking wine at a patio café on the Rhine River, because it portrays a negative image of American expansionist endeavor.

• I mean to say, America cannot turn back, is what I am talking about... death awaits, is the message! Except to add that the two protagonists are children of the sixties drug age, just like and symbolic of, America turning inwards under Trump and Hillary? –  John Commented May 25, 2016 at 16:41
• 1 "Foreign accents" like those in Texas, Kansas, and New York. It was written by Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Terry Southern. The movie is open to interpretation, but the facts are not. –  Yorik Commented May 25, 2016 at 16:57
• But your comment is well put and taken in stride, and you might be correct... it comes down to whether or not Henry Fonda preferred to speak German or English, and is actually bilingual, and that has always been debatable, even in the 1940s for some reason...don't ask me why... it was speculation. –  John Commented May 25, 2016 at 17:40

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From the National Film Registry: “Easy Rider” (1969)

May 17, 2023

Posted by: Cary O’Dell

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Today, May 17th, marks what would have been the 87th birthday of actor Dennis Hopper.  Though he passed away in May of 2010, the landmark films he made endure.  Chief among them, of course, was 1969’s “Easy Rider.”  Co-starring Peter Fonda and Jacks Nicholson, “Easy Rider” was named to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry in 1998.  In the essay below, film scholar William Wolf looks back at this wide-open classic.

Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, drugs, hip pies, the open road, protests, long – hair, nonconformity, backlash. “Easy Rider” picked up the beat of the 1960s at the end of that turbulent decade. It also fueled a de veloping urge to make personal films that could be done on budgets low enough to deal with subjects of little or no interest to conventional Hollywood.

The French New Wave already had its influence and now it was the turn of American filmmakers. True, a ma jor Hollywood company, Columbia, released “Easy Rid er,” but the deal was struck only after the independent venture had been completed. Independent filmmakers in succeeding decades owe a debt to “Easy Rider” as one of several 1960s films that inspired others to work outside of the mainstream.

The film was the brainchild of Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda, who brought their idea to Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson, whose Raybert Productions coproduced the film with the Pando Company. The budget was a mere $400,000. With Hopper, Fonda and Jack Nicholson in the cast, the film had potential. But would they finish it? Some would – be backers had their doubts.

Hopper directed, Fonda produced, and both Hopper and Fonda collaborated on the screenplay after a draft had been written by Terry Southern. By the standards of the time, the low – budget film was a meaningful financial as well as critical success, grossing nearly $20 million, ac cording to the trade publication “Variety.” At least for a while producers looked for directors to make them “another ‘Easy Rider’.” The awards were numerous. The Cannes Film Festival cited it as best film by a new direc tor. Nicholson was named best supporting actor by both the National Society of Film Critics and the New York Film Critics Circle, and the National Society also gave a special award to Dennis Hopper.

Looking back on the film today is like entering a time warp. Were Nicholson, Hopper and Fonda ever that young? Although he had ample experience, Nicholson had yet to have a breakthrough. As George, the doomed lawyer who befriends two drug – dealing, freedom- loving bike riders, he gave a performance that became the turn ing point in his career. Peter Fonda as Wyatt and Den nis Hop per as Billy, with their long hair re calling the trap pings of free expression that characterized the era, embodied the period’s drug culture. Those were no fake joints they smoked on-screen.

The journey of the trio characterizes the clash between such liberated souls and a society that looks askance at nonconformists. In ironic symbolism Wyatt’s motorbike is decorated with the stars and stripes, with a safety hel met to match. Wyatt also has an American flag replicat ed on the back of his leather jacket. At the outset Wyatt and Billy make a drug buy in Mexico. They are seen care fully sniffing coke to make sure it’s the real stuff, as does “The Connection” (Phil Spector) to whom they sell some of it at an airport.

Both men are decent guys, not intending to harm any one and just wanting to enjoy roaming the country. Billy is pretty well stoned most of the time. The man in charge at a second – rate motel, taking in their long – haired biker look, refuses to open the door. A hitchhiker to whom they give a lift leads them to a commune, where more of the film’s spirit — and that of the sixties — comes into play. Relaxed living, friendly women, yet not without male jealousy.

As they continue their trip, playfully riding uninvited behind a school band in a parade gets them busted in New Mexico. In jail they meet George, who hasn’t done anything. He comes from a prominent family, is a lawyer, and is sleeping off a drunk. George acquaints them with the facts of life prevalent in that part of the country.

“Well, they got this here — see – uh – scissor – happy ‘ Beautify America’ thing goin’ on around here. They’re tryin’ to make everybody look like Yul Brynner. They used – uh – rusty blades on the last two long – hairs that they brought in here and I wasn’t here to protect them. You see – uh — I’m a lawyer. Done a lot of work for the ACLU.” George helps them get out of the clink before they get worked over and now two become three.

George has a card that he says was given to him by the governor of Louisiana advertising “Madame Tinkertoy’s House of Blue Lights,” in New Orleans, reputed to be “the finest whorehouse in the South.” Off they go on the next leg of their trip with George riding on the back of Wyatt’s bike.

There’s a funny scene when they sleep outdoors and his new companions try to teach George how to smoke grass. In retrospect, the idea of Nicholson not knowing how to use the weed and inhale properly becomes even funnier. George protests that he has enough problems with the booze. The scene exudes a feeling of camarade rie as well as humor.

George is the one with the speeches that underscore what the film is about: “This used to be a helluva good country. I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with it.”  It’s not the long hair or the way they dress that upsets people, he tells Billy and Wyatt, “What you represent to them is freedom.” He warns: “Course don’t ever tell any body — that they’re not free, ‘cause then, they’re gonna get real busy killin’ and maimin’ to prove to you that they are.

We can predict that the trio will run into trouble en route, and indeed, they do, first at a roadside café where the long hair of Wyatt and Billy proves an irritant. They’re needled by a local deputy and his cronies, extra resentful because several young girls are attracted to the travelers. Later, while they are sleeping in a swamp ar ea, a group of men beat them brutally, killing George. The distraught survivors continue, determined to reach New Orleans. At Madame Tinkertoy’s emporium, they become friendly with Karen (Karen Black) and Mary (Toni Basil), who agree to join them in the Mardi Gras, which is in full blast.

A hallucinatory sequence follows, as the women and men wander into a cemetery, pop pills, and make love. It’s a mind – blowing binge before the storm, and after ward Wyatt and Billy take to the highway once again. Two men in a passing truck taunt the outsiders and one aims a rifle at Billy, who responds by giving him the fin ger. Billy is gunned down. Wyatt first tries to stanch the bleeding, then rides for help. He too is shot. The camera pulls back to encompass a view of the victims and the countryside with the “Ballad of Easy Rider”

In effect the shooting marks an epitaph for an era. The Kennedy assassinations. The Martin Luther King, Jr. as sassination. The killing of Malcolm X. The Chicago riots. The protests against the Vietnam War. The 1960s were over, but the pain, including the growing opposition to the war, would carry over into the 1970s.

“Easy Rider” is more visual than verbal. There is a feeling of spontaneity in various scenes, and the cinematog raphy of Laszlo Kovacs and the settings add to the im pression of authenticity. The scenes of the countryside through which the protagonists travel are exhilarating, offering a loving look at the beauty of the land. To get actual footage of a Mardi Gras, the event was shot in advance of the rest of the film, in fact before the script had been completed. Once the filming of the story be gan, the shooting was done in sequence. “Easy Rider” became the on – the – road experience of its makers who were living out their own take on the 1960s through the project.

As for the title, Fonda explained its origin in a 1969 inter view in “Rolling Stone” with writer Elizabeth Campbell. “’Easy rider’ is a Southern term for a whore’s old man, not a pimp, but the dude who lives with a chick. Because he’s got the easy ride. Well, that’s what’s happened to America, man. Liberty’s become a whore, and we’re all taking an easy ride.&

The film holds up for its overall impact, although the pace lags occasionally and some of the dialogue is banal or pretentious. The music, an added “character” in the film, provides an important element in setting the right tone. The soundtrack is rich with numbers by such groups and performers as Steppenwolf, the Byrds, The Band, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Little Eva, The Elec tric Flag, Bob Dylan, and Roger McGuinn, who composed and performed the title song “Ballad of Easy Rider.

Today the film is best viewed as an artifact of the period in which it was made. For those who didn’t live through the 1960s, “Easy Rider” tells us much about the dynam ics and attitudes of the decade and what kind of music was popular. There’s also the pleasure of seeing early Nicholson, Hopper, and Fonda, who would all go on to further important work, and we see Karen Black before her acclaimed performance in Rafelson’s “Five Easy Pieces.

The film is also a nostalgic reminder of the continuing ups and downs of the independent filmmaking move ment in the United States. The excitement engendered when a non-mainstream film succeeds inspires other work, but the limited opportunities leave room for only a few financial success stories. The talent often moves into the mainstream of big – budget films, and the struggle persists with newcomers trying to make their mark with their personal visions. But there aren’t many easy rides. There is, however, an “Easy Rider” as a perpetual re minder of what’s possible.

William Wolf, who publishes the Wolf Entertainment Guide on the web, is a critic, author, journalist and lecturer. He writes extensively on film and stage and teaches film courses at New York University. He was formerly film critic for the Gannett newspaper chain, a critic and contributing editor of “New York Magazine” and the film critic for “Cue Magazine.”

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“Jill Lepore is an extraordinarily gifted writer, and  These Truths  is nothing short of a masterpiece of American history. By engaging with our country's painful past (and present) in an intellectually honest way, she has created a book that truly does encapsulate the American story in all its pain and all its triumph.”

–Michael Schaub,  NPR  

“A splendid rendering—filled with triumph, tragedy, and hope—that will please Lepore’s readers immensely and win her many new ones.”

— Kirkus Reviews , starred review

“This thought-provoking and fascinating book stands to become the definitive one-volume U.S. history for a new generation.”

— Library Journal , starred review

“An ambitious and provocative attempt to interpret American history as an effort to fulfill and maintain certain fundamental principles. . . . Lepore is a historian with wide popular appeal, and this comprehensive work will answer readers’ questions about who we are as a nation.”

— Booklist , starred review

“Astounding… [Lepore] has assembled evidence of an America that was better than some thought, worse than almost anyone imagined, and weirder than most serious history books ever convey. Armed with the facts of what happened before, we are better able to approach our collective task of figuring out what should happen now . . . Perhaps instead of the next U2 album, Apple could make a copy of  These Truths  appear on every iPhone—not only because it offers the basic civics education that every American needs, but because it is a welcome corrective to the corrosive histories peddled by partisans.”

—Casey N. Cep,  Harvard Magazine

“In her epic new work, Jill Lepore helps us learn from whence we came.”

— Oprah Magazine

“Sweeping and propulsive.”

“ ‘An old-fashioned civics book,’ Harvard historian and  New Yorker  contributor Jill Lepore calls it, a glint in her eye. This fat, ludicrously ambitious one-volume history is a lot more than that. In its spirit of inquiry, in its eager iconoclasms,  These Truths  enacts the founding ideals of the country it describes.

― Huffington Post

“It's an audacious undertaking to write a readable history of America, and Jill Lepore is more than up to the task. But  These Truths  is also an astute exploration of the ways in which the country is living up to its potential, and where it is not.”

— Business Insider

“Gutsy, lyrical, and expressive… [ These Truths ] is a perceptive and necessary contribution to understanding the American condition of late.… It captures the fullness of the past, where hope rises out of despair, renewal out of destruction, and forward momentum out of setbacks.”

—Jack E. Davis,  Chicago Tribune

“Lepore’s brilliant book,  These Truths , rings as clear as a church bell, the lucid, welcome yield of clear thinking and a capable, curious mind.”

—Karen R. Long,  Newsday

“ A splendid rendering —filled with triumph, tragedy, and hope—that will please Lepore’s readers immensely and win her many new ones.”

“An ambitious and provocative attempt to interpret American history as an effort to fulfull and maintain certain fundamental principles . . . Lepore is a historian with wide popular appeal, and this comprehensive work will answer readers’ questions about who we are as a nation.”

“In this time of disillusionment with American politics, Jill Lepore’s beautifully written book should be essential reading for everyone who cares about the country’s future. Her history of the United States reminds us of the dilemmas that have plagued the country and the institutional strengths that have allowed us to survive as a republic for over two centuries. At a minimum, her book should be required reading for every federal officeholder.”

—Robert Dallek, author of Franklin D. Roosevelt

"No one has written with more passion and brilliance about how a flawed and combustible America kept itself tethered to the transcendent ideals on which it was founded. If the country is to recover from its current crisis, These Truths will illuminate the way."

—Gary Gerstle, author of Liberty and Coercion

“Who can write a comprehensive yet lucid history of the sprawling United States in a single volume? Only Jill Lepore has the verve, wit, range, and insights to pull off this daring and provocative book. Interweaving many lively biographies, These Truths illuminates the origins of the passions and causes, which still inspire and divide Americans in an age that needs all the truth we can find.”

—Alan Taylor, author of American Revolutions

“Lepore brings a scholar's comprehensive rigor and a poet's lyrical precision to this singular single-volume history of the United States. Understanding America's past, as she demonstrates, has always been a central American project. She knows that the "story of America" is as plural and mutable as the nation itself, and the result is a work of prismatic richness, one that rewards not just reading but rereading. This will be an instant classic.”

—Kwame Anthony Appiah, author of The Lies that Bind

“Anyone interested in the future of the Republic must read this book. One of our greatest historians succeeds, where so many have failed, to make sense of the whole canvas of our history. Without ignoring the horrors of conquest, slavery or recurring prejudices, she manages nonetheless to capture the epic quality of the American past. With passion, compassion, wit, and remarkable insight, Lepore brings it all to life, the good, the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. This is a manifesto for our necessarily shared future.”

—Lynn Hunt, author of History: Why it Matters

“In this inspiring and enlightening book, Jill Lepore accomplishes the grand task of telling us what we need to know about our past in order to be good citizens today. Avoiding political and ideological agendas, she confronts the contradictions that come from being born a land of both liberty and slavery, but she uses such conflicts to find meaning—and hope—in the tale of America’s progress.”

—Walter Isaacson, University Professor of History, Tulane, author of The Innovators

"Lepore is a truly gifted writer with profound insight."

"This vivid history brings alive the contradictions and hypocrisies of the land of the free"

- David Aaronovitch, The Times

"A history for the 21st century, far more inclusive than the standard histories of the past"

"Monumental ... a crucial work for presenting a fresh and clear-sighted narrative of the entire story ... exciting and page-turningly fascinating, in one of those rare history books that can be read with pleasure for its sheer narrative energy"

- Simon Winchester, New Statesman

"Jill Lepore is that rare combination in modern life of intellect, originality and style"

- Amanda Foreman, TLS

A brilliant, revelatory account of the Cold War origins of the data-mad, algorithmic twenty-first century, from the author of the acclaimed international bestseller,  These Truths .

The Simulmatics Corporation, founded in 1959, mined data, targeted voters, accelerated news, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics, and disordered knowledge--decades before Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Cambridge Analytica. Silicon Valley likes to imagine it has no past but the scientists of Simulmatics are the long-dead grandfathers of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Borrowing from psychological warfare, they used computers to predict and direct human behavior, deploying their “People Machine” from New York, Cambridge, and Saigon for clients that included John Kennedy’s presidential campaign, the  New York Times , Young & Rubicam, and, during the Vietnam War, the Department of Defense. Jill Lepore, distinguished Harvard historian and  New Yorker  staff writer, unearthed from the archives the almost unbelievable story of this long-vanished corporation, and of the women hidden behind it. In the 1950s and 1960s, Lepore argues, Simulmatics invented the future by building the machine in which the world now finds itself trapped and tormented, algorithm by algorithm.

“A person can't help but feel inspired by the riveting intelligence and joyful curiosity of Jill Lepore.  Knowing that there is a mind like hers in the world is a hope-inducing thing.”

            --George Saunders

“Everything Lepore writes is distinguished by intelligence, eloquence, and fresh insight.  If Then  is that, and even more: It’s absolutely fascinating, excavating a piece of little-known American corporate history that reveals a huge amount about the way we live today and the companies that define the modern era.”

            --Susan Orlean

“Data science, Jill Lepore reminds us in this brilliant book, has a past, and she tells it through the engrossing story of Simulmatics, the tiny, long-forgotten company that helped invent our data-obsessed world, in which prediction is seemingly the only knowledge that matters. A captivating, deeply incisive work.”

            —Frederik  Logevall , Pulitzer Prize-winning author of  Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam

“Think today’s tech giants invented data mining and market manipulation? Think again. In this page-turning, eye-opening history, Jill Lepore reveals the Cold War roots of the tech-saturated present, in a thrilling tale that moves from the campaigns of Eisenhower and Kennedy to ivied think tanks, Madison Avenue ad firms, and the hamlets of Vietnam. Told with verve, grace, and humanity,  If Then  is an essential, sobering story for understanding our times.”

—Margaret O’Mara, author of  The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America

“It didn’t all start with Facebook. We have long been fascinated with the potential of using computing technology to predict human behavior. In another fast-paced narrative, Jill Lepore brilliantly uncovers the history of the Simulmatics Corp, which launched the volatile mix of computing, politics and personal behavior that now divides our nation, feeds on private information, and weakens the strength our democratic institutions. If you want to know where this all started, you need not look any further--read this book!”

— Julian Zelizer, author of  Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker and the Rise of the New Republican Party 

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and is also a staff writer at  The New Yorker . A two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, her many books include the international bestseller,  These Truths .

A New York Times and National Bestseller and Winner of the 2015 American History Book Prize

"Ms. Lepore’s lively, surprising and occasionally salacious history is far more than the story of a comic strip. The author, a professor of history at Harvard, places Wonder Woman squarely in the story of women’s rights in America—a cycle of rights won, lost and endlessly fought for again. Like many illuminating histories, this one shows how issues we debate today were under contention just as vigorously decades ago, including birth control, sex education, the ways in which women can combine work and family, and the effects of 'violent entertainment' on children. 'The tragedy of feminism in the twentieth century is the way its history seemed to be forever disappearing,' Ms. Lepore writes. Her superb narrative brings that history vividly into the present, weaving individual lives into the sweeping changes of the century.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Lepore’s brilliance lies in knowing what to do with the material she has. In her hands, the Wonder Woman story unpacks not only a new cultural history of feminism, but a theory of history as well.” — New York Times Book Review   “Lepore specializes in excavating old flashpoints—forgotten or badly misremembered collisions between politics and cultural debates in America’s past. She lays out for our modern sensibility how some event or social problem was fought over by interest groups, reformers, opportunists, and “thought leaders” of the day. The result can look both familiar and disturbing, like our era’s arguments flipped in a funhouse mirror….Besides archives and comics Lepore relies on journalism, notebooks, letters, and traces of memoir left by the principals, as well as interviews with surviving colleagues, children, and extended family. Her discipline is worthy of a first-class detective….Lepore convinces us that we should know more about early feminists whose work Wonder Woman drew on and carried forward….A key spotter of connections, Lepore retrieves a remarkably recognizable feminist through-line, showing us 1920s debates about work-life balance, for example, that sound like something from The Atlantic in the past decade.” —New York Review of Books   “Even non-comix nerds (or those too young to remember Lynda Carter) will marvel at Jill Lepore’s deep dive into the real-world origins of the Amazonian superhero with the golden lasso. The fact that a polyamory enthusiast created her partly as a tribute to the reproductive-rights pioneer Margaret Sanger is, somehow, only the fourth or fifth most interesting thing in Ms. Woman’s bizarre background.” —New York Magazine   “With a defiantly unhurried ease, Lepore reconstructs the prevailing cultural mood that birthed the idea of Wonder Woman, carefully delineating the conceptual debt the character owes to early-20th-century feminism in general and the birth control movement in particular….Again and again, she distills the figures she writes about into clean, simple, muscular prose, making unequivocal assertions that carry a faint electric charge…[and] attain a transgressive, downright badass swagger.” —Slate   “Deftly combines biography and cultural history to trace the entwined stories of Marston, Wonder Woman, and 20th-century feminism….Lepore – a professor of American history at Harvard, a New Yorker writer, and the author of “Book of Ages” – is an endlessly energetic and knowledgeable guide to the fascinating backstory of Wonder Woman. She’s particularly skillful at showing the subtle process by which personal details migrate from life into art.” —Christian Science Monitor   “Wonder Woman, everyone's favorite female superhero (bulletproof bracelets, hello!), gets the Lasso of Truth treatment in this illuminating biography. Lepore, a Harvard prof and New Yorker writer, delves into the complicated family life of Wonder Woman's creator (who invented the lie detector, BTW), examines the use of bondage in his comics, and highlights the many ways in which the beloved Amazonian princess has come to embody feminism.” —Cosmopolitan   “The Secret History of Wonder Woman relates a tale so improbable, so juicy, it’ll have you saying, “Merciful Minerva!”… an astonishingly thorough investigation of the man behind the world’s most popular female superhero…. Lepore has assembled a vast trove of images and deploys them cunningly. Besides a hefty full-color section of Wonder Woman art in the middle, there are dozens of black-and-white pictures scattered throughout the text. Many of these are panels from Marston’s comics that mirror events in his own life. Combined with Lepore’s zippy prose, it all makes for a supremely engaging reading experience.” —Etelka Lehoczky, NPR   “If it makes your head spin to imagine a skimpily clad pop culture icon as (spoiler alert!) a close relation of feminist birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, then prepare to be dazzled by the truths revealed in historian Jill Lepore’s “The Secret History of Wonder Woman.” The story behind Wonder Woman is sensational, spellbinding and utterly improbable. Her origins lie in the feminism of the early 1900s, and the intertwined dramas that surrounded her creation are the stuff of pulp fiction and tabloid scandal….It took a super-sleuth to uncover the mysteries of this intricate history, hidden from view for more than half a century. With acrobatic research prowess, muscular narrative chops and disarming flashes of humor, Lepore rises to the challenge, bringing to light previously unknown details and deliberately obfuscated connections.” —San Francisco Chronicle   “This captivating, sometimes racy, charming illustrated history is one part biography of the character and one part biography of her fascinating creator, psychologist and inventor William Moulton Marston—an early feminist who believed, way before his time, that the world would be a better place if only women were running it….In the process of bringing her ‘superhero’ to life in this very carefully researched, witty secret ‘herstory,’ Lepore herself emerges as a kind of superheroine: a woman on a mission—as energetic, powerful, brilliant and provocative as her subject.” —Good Housekeeping   “This book is important, readable scholarship, making the connection between popular culture and the deeper history of the American woman’s fight for equality….Lepore restores Wonder Woman to her rightful and righteous place.” —The Kansas City Star “Fascinating…often brilliant….Through assiduous research (the endnotes comprise almost a third of the book and are often very interesting reading), Lepore unravels a hidden history, and in so doing links her subjects’ lives to some of the most important social movements of the era. It’s a remarkable, thought-provoking achievement.” —Bookpage   “The Marston family’s story is ripe for psychoanalysis. And so is The Secret History , since it raises interesting questions about what motivates writers to choose the subjects of their books. Having devoted her last work to Jane Franklin Mecom, Benjamin Franklin’s sister, Lepore clearly has a passion for intelligent, opinionated women whose legacies have been overshadowed by the men they love. In her own small way, she’s helping women get the justice they deserve, not unlike her tiara’d counterpart….It has nearly everything you might want in a page-turner: tales of S&M, skeletons in the closet, a believe-it-or-not weirdness in its biographical details, and something else that secretly powers even the most “serious” feminist history—fun.” —Entertainment Weekly   “An origin story far deeper, weirder, and kinkier than anything a cartoonist ever invented.” —Vulture   “Lepore restores Wonder Woman to her rightful place as an essential women’s rights icon in this dynamically researched and interpreted, spectacularly illustrated, downright astounding work of discovery that injects new zest into the history of feminism.” —Booklist (*starred review*)

“The fullest and most fascinating portrait ever created about the complicated, unconventional family that inspired one of the most enduring feminist icons in pop culture…. The Secret History of Wonder Woman is its own magic lasso, one that compels history to finally tell the truth about Wonder Woman—and compels the rest of us to behold it.” — Los Angeles Times

“ The Secret History of Wonder Woman  is as racy, as improbable, as awesomely righteous, and as filled with curious devices as an episode of the comic book itself. In the nexus of feminism and popular culture, Jill Lepore has found a revelatory chapter of American history. I will never look at Wonder Woman’s bracelets the same way again.” —Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home  

"Hugely entertaining." -- The Atlantic

“ Lepore has an astonishing story and tells it extremely well. She acts as a sort of lie detector, but proceeds through elegant narrative rather than binary test. Sentences are poised, adverbs rare. Each chapter is carefully shaped. At a time when few are disposed to see history as a branch of literature, Lepore occupies a prominent place in American letters. Her microhistories weave compelling lives into larger stories.” —The Daily Beast   “In the spirited, thoroughly reported "The Secret History of Wonder Woman," Jill Lepore recounts the fascinating details behind the Amazonian princess' origin story….[Lepore]seamlessly shifts from the micro to the macro….A panel depicting this labor unrest is just one of scores that appear throughout Lepore's book, further amplifying the author's vivid prose.” —Newsday   “A Harvard professor with impeccable scholarly credentials, Lepore treats her subject seriously, as if she is writing the biography of a feminist pioneer like Margaret Sanger, the founder of the birth control movement — which this book is, to an extent….Through extensive research and a careful reading of the Wonder Woman comic books, she argues convincingly that the story of this character is an indelible chapter in the history of women’s rights.” —Miami Herald  

A Finalist for the 2013 National Book Award for Nonfiction

From one of our most accomplished and widely admired historians, a revelatory portrait of Benjamin Franklin’s youngest sister and a history of history itself. Like her brother, Jane Franklin was a passionate reader, a gifted writer, and an astonishingly shrewd political commentator. Unlike him, she was a mother of twelve. Benjamin Franklin, who wrote more letters to his sister than he wrote to anyone else, was the original American self-made man; his sister spent her life caring for her children. They left very different traces behind. Making use of an amazing cache of little- studied material, including documents, objects, and portraits only just discovered, Jill Lepore brings Jane Franklin to life in a way that illuminates not only this one woman but an entire world—a world usually lost to history. Lepore’s life of Jane Franklin, with its strikingly original vantage on her remarkable brother, is at once a wholly different account of the founding of the United States and one of the great untold stories of American history and letters: a life unknown.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — On The Road — From “On The Road” to “Easy Rider”: America’s Evolving Road Idealism”

From "On The Road" to "Easy Rider": America's Evolving Road Idealism"

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Bicycles Have Evolved. Have We?

My first bicycle was not, in fact, a bicycle. I rode it in 1968, when I was two years old and as tubby as a bear cub. It had four wheels, not two, and no pedals: strictly speaking, it was a scooter. But Playskool called it a Tyke Bike, so I say it qualifies, and aside from the matte-black, aluminum-alloy number that I’ve got now, which is called (by the manufacturer dead seriously, and by me aspirationally) the Bad Boy, the Tyke Bike may be the swankiest bicycle I’ve ever ridden. According to the box, Playskool’s scooter—red and blue and white, with a yellow, leopard-spotted wooden seat, chrome handlebars, and black, white-walled wheels—offered “smart high style” for the “preschool jet set,” as if a little girl in a diaper and a romper were about to scoot along the jetway to board a T.W.A. flight bound for Zurich.

Before being handed down to me, my Tyke Bike, like most of the bicycles in my life, had belonged to my brother, Jack, and to both of my sisters, and, earlier still, to cousins or neighbors or some other family from Our Lady of Good Counsel, whose annual parish sale was where we always got our best stuff, bless the Virgin Mary. By the time I got the Tyke Bike, the paint was scuffed, the leopard spots had worn off, and the white plastic handlebar grips had been yanked off and lost, most likely buried in the back yard by the slobber-jawed neighborhood St. Bernard, a Christmas-present puppy whose name was Jingles and who was eventually run over by a car, like so many dogs on our street, which is another reason more people should ride bikes. I didn’t mind about the missing handlebar grips. I tucked a stuffed bear into my red wagon, tied its rope to my seat post, and scooted down the sidewalk, dragging the wagon behind me, my first bike hack. Far from being a jet-setter, I have always been an unhurried bicyclist, something between deliberate and fretful. Jack, a speed demon and a danger mouse, but above all a gentleman, would wait for me at every telephone pole. Jack and Jill went up the hill , everyone would call out, as we wheeled past. Pbfftttttt , we’d raspberry back.

My current bicycle, the Cannondale Bad Boy, is said to be cloaked in “urban armor,” looks as though it could fight in a regime-changing war, and is built for “traffic-slaying performance.” I like the idea of being redoubtable on a roundabout, Mad Max on a mews, but, in truth, I have never slain any traffic. I have never slain anything. I once knew an old Polish man who called all drivers one of three things—“Cowboy!” “Old Woman!” “Teen-ager!”—which he’d shout out, raging, behind the steering wheel of his station wagon, in a heavily accented growl. I am, and have always been, Old Woman.

The Bad Boy is the only bike I’ve ever bought new. I paid an embarrassing amount of money for it in 2001, to celebrate getting tenure and maybe with the idea that I was finally going to be a badass, that all I needed was this James Dean mean-streets city bike. But, the minute I got it home, I started hacking it, girling it out. I bolted a radio to the handlebars and listened to the news on my ride to work every day—I heard the war on terror unfold on that bicycle—until my friend Bruce told me I’d be exactly seventy-four per cent happier if I listened to music instead. WERS. College radio. Indigo Girls. Dixie Chicks . He was right. For a long time, I had a baby seat strapped onto a rack in the back, molded gray plastic with a blue foam cushion seat and a nylon seat belt. Babies, not to say bad boys, would fall asleep back there, their nodding heads tipped over by the great weight of baby helmets covered in the spikes of a stegosaurus, poking into my back. I steered around potholes, ever so slowly, so as not to jolt them awake. Old Woman.

Bicycles are the workhorses of the world’s transportation system. More people get places by bicycle than by any other means, unless you count walking, which is also good for you, and for the planet, but you can travel four times faster on a bicycle than on foot, using only a fifth the exertion. People all over the world, and especially outside Western Europe and North America, get to school and work, transport goods, cart passengers, and even plow fields with bicycles. In many places, there isn’t any other choice. Bikes are cheap, and easy to fix when they break, especially if you can keep track of your Allen keys and your tire levers. Mine are on the breakfast table, because, at the moment, I have a bike stand in the kitchen. For every car on earth, there are two bikes, one for every four people. (I refuse to count stationary bikes, including Pelotons, since they go nowhere.) “We live on a bicycle planet,” Jody Rosen writes in “ Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle ” (Crown), a set of quirky and kaleidoscopic stories. But roads and parking lots and entire cities are still being built for cars, even though they’re wrecking the world. Or, as bicycle advocates would have it, riffing on Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” two wheels good, four wheels bad. Two wheels are better than two wings. In a contest of humans against all other animals in the efficiency of locomotion, humans on foot are about as ungainly, or gainly, as sheep. Condors come in first. But humans on bicycles beat even birds.

A few years back, the bicentennial of the bicycle wheeled past at breakneck, bike-messenger speed. In 1817, Baron Karl von Drais, the Master of the Woods and Forests to the Duke of Baden, invented a contraption called the Laufmaschine , or running machine. A climate crisis had led to a great dying off of livestock, including horses, especially in Germany. Drais meant for the Laufmaschine to be a substitute for the horse. It had a wooden frame, a leather saddle, two in-line wheels, and no pedals; you sort of scooted around on it, and a full-grown man could pick up pretty good speed. (“On descent it equals a horse at full speed,” Drais wrote.) In England, Laufmaschinen were called “swiftwalkers.” My Tyke Bike was a kind of Laufmaschine . I added the wagon, though.

In the history of the bicycle, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Lately, posh toddlers, the newest preschool jet set, roll around on modern swiftwalkers, marketed as “wooden balance bikes.” If you bike all your life, there’s a fair chance you’ll bike the whole history of bicycles. When I was three, I started riding a red metal tricycle, another hand-me-down from my brother. It had a chrome fender in the front, a red running board in the back, and, most crucial, pedals. The cranking of pedals converts downward motion into forward motion, with multiplying force. No one’s quite sure who came up with this idea—most historians place their bets on a French carriage-maker, in 1855—but putting a crank on the axle of the front wheel, with pedals on either side of the hub, changed everything about bicycles, including their name: most people called the ones with pedals “velocipedes,” which is, roughly, Latin for “fast feet.” People expected velocipedes to replace horses. “We think the bicycle an animal, which will, in a great measure, supersede the horse,” one American wrote in 1869. “It does not cost as much; it will not eat, kick, bite, get sick, or die.”

My next bike, the red-and-yellow Big Wheel, had a lot in common with a velocipede known as the penny-farthing, which was invented in the eighteen-seventies. The penny-farthing, like the Big Wheel, had a much bigger wheel in front because, so long as the pedals cranked the front wheel, the bigger the wheel, the faster you could ride. “An ever saddled horse which eats nothing,” a Boston penny-farthing manufacturer promised, boasting speeds of a mile in under three minutes. “The Big Wheels are rolling,” the television ads of my childhood announced, “with the speed you need to win!” Big Wheels came, and they went; they were made of plastic, and mine fell apart during a figure-eight race around a parking lot against the kids next door, when I skidded off course and crashed into a telephone pole. Penny-farthings were dangerous, too: riders pitched right over the top. (The Big Wheel débuted in 1969, and a fiftieth-anniversary edition came out in 2019. “It’s just a really cheap piece of crap,” a reviewer at Walmart.com reported.)

My first two-wheeled bicycle was a Schwinn, hyacinth-purple. My father, who seems to have spent most spring weekends raising and lowering bicycle seats, retrofitted it for me by bolting back on the rickety pair of training wheels that we kept on a shelf in the garage. Aside from the training wheels, everything on that purple Schwinn had been invented by the end of the eighteen-eighties: two wheels of about the same size, pneumatic tires, and pedals that drive the rear wheel by way of a chain and sprockets. This type of bike, in the eighteen-eighties, was marketed as a “safety.” Unlike earlier models, it was surprisingly risk-free, mainly because, even without foot brakes, you could stop the bike by taking your feet off the pedals and skidding to a halt. That, as my mother liked to point out, was how I ruined all my sneakers.

The safety was the prototype of every modern bicycle. Most everything added to the bicycle since is just tinkering around the edges. During the bike craze of the eighteen-nineties, bicycles became an emblem of modernity; they were the epitome, as Paul Smethurst argued in “ The Bicycle: Towards a Global History ” (2015), of “the cult of speed, a lightness of being, a desire for existential freedom and a celebration of the future.” That’s how it felt to me, too, when I first pedalled away from home, without my training wheels, all on my own. My favorite bike ever, though, was my next bike, my sister’s Sears knockoff of the Schwinn Sting-Ray. It had a green banana seat with glitter in the vinyl, monkey handlebars, and a sissy bar, which I had always understood to be the place where little sisters were supposed to sit. I added rainbow-colored covers to the spokes and rode to school, the library, the candy store, hitching my bike to posts with a combination lock attached to a cable as thin as yarn. No one ever stole it.

To ride a bike, Rosen points out, is to come as close to flying by your own power as humans ever will. No part of you touches the ground. You ride on air. Not for nothing were Orville and Wilbur Wright bicycle manufacturers when they first achieved flight, in Kitty Hawk, in 1903. Historically, that kind of freedom has been especially meaningful to girls and women. Bicycling, Susan B. Anthony said in 1896, “has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.” I’ve always had a sneaking feeling that, somehow, I owe it to feminism to pedal hard, weave through traffic, crave speed, curse at cars. A guy in my neighborhood wears a T-shirt that reads “Cyclopath.” In my mind’s eye, I’m that guy. Instead, I stop at yellow lights and smile at strangers, gushing with good will, giddy just to be out there.

Bicycles and bicyclists veer to the political left. Environmentalists ride bicycles. American suffragists rode bicycles. So did English socialists, who called the bicycle “the people’s nag.” Animal-welfare activists, who opposed the whipping of horses, favored bicycles. In 1896, the American preacher who coined the expression “What Would Jesus Do?” had this to say about bicycles: “I think Jesus might ride a wheel if He were in our place, in order to save His own strength and the beast of burden.” But bicycles have also been used in warfare on six continents, and were favored by colonial officials during the age of empire. After the League of American Wheelmen started the Good Roads Movement, in 1880, the asphalt that paved the roads for bicyclists was mined in Trinidad, and the rubber for tires came from the Belgian Congo and the Amazon basin.

For a while, starting in the eighteen-nineties, the bicycle seemed likely to finally beat out the horse. Aside from not needing to be fed and not dying, bicycles are also quieter and cleaner than horses, something I thought a lot about as a kid, because I had a job mucking out stables. But then along came the automobile. “There are some who claim the automobile will replace the bicycle, but this is rank nonsense,” a Maine magazine reported in 1899. “Those who have become attached to their bicycles—there are several millions of bicycle riders—will not easily give up the pleasure of skimming along the country like a bird . . . for the more doubtful delight of riding in the cumbersome, ill-smelling automobile.”

In 1899, 1.2 million bicycles were sold in the United States. Henry Ford’s Model T made its début in 1908. The next year, only a hundred and sixty thousand bicycles were sold in the U.S. In the absence of bike lanes, cyclists in all states but one have to follow the rules of something known as the Uniform Vehicle Code, first adopted in 1926. Like jaywalking, a crime invented by the automobile industry to criminalize being a pedestrian, the U.V.C. treats bicycles as cars that go too slow. “It shall be unlawful for any person unnecessarily to drive at such a slow speed as to impede or block the normal and reasonable movement of traffic,” the U.V.C. decreed in 1930. E. B. White was among those who protested, calling for “a network of permanent bicycle paths.” (Many paths were built under the direction of Robert Moses .) “A great many people have now reached forty years of age in this country, despite all the handicaps,” White wrote in this magazine in 1933, when he was thirty-four, “and they are the ones who specially enjoy bicycling, the men being somewhat elated on discovering that they can still ride no hands.” In 1944, in what became known as the Far to the Right law, the U.V.C. stated that “any person operating a bicycle upon a roadway shall ride as near to the right side of the roadway as practicable,” which could mean being driven off the road.

By the nineteen-fifties, when the League of American Wheelmen disbanded and bicycles were excluded from many roads (including all of the new federal highway system), bikes had been reinvented as toys, child’s play. Grownups drove cars; kids rode bikes. Girls were supposed to ride girls’ bikes, although when, at age twelve, I inherited a girl’s three-speed Raleigh, I decided I hated girls’ bikes. Twelve was when I first started to see clearly the price you had to pay for being a girl, the vulnerability, and right about then I got more scared of cars, too. A boy in my sixth-grade class was killed riding his bike home from school. I covered the frame of that feckless three-speed Raleigh with black duct tape, to make it meaner. It’s bad enough being powerless, because of being a kid and, on top of it all, a girl; it’s worse when the adults are riding around in cages made of three tons of metal. It felt then, and still feels now, like being a bird flying in a sky filled with airplanes: the deafening roar of their engines, their impossible speed, the cruelty of steel, the inescapable menace, the looming sense of catastrophe, your own little wings flapping in silence while theirs slice thunderously. Black duct tape is no defense, and no disguise, but it was all I could find in the kitchen drawer.

The first time I was ever hit by a car, I was riding home from school on a robin’s-egg-blue Fuji ten-speed. I’d painted it polka-dot, strapped a milk crate to the back rack, and duct-taped a transistor radio to the crate, so I could listen to Red Sox games. Maybe I was distracted: ninth inning, pitching change. I don’t remember. A station wagon hit me from behind; I broke its windshield, bounced off the hood, and tumbled onto the road, into oncoming traffic. I remember lying on the pavement, unable to move, watching a truck heading straight at me. Swerving to avoid me, it ran over my bike. A few minutes after I was taken away in an ambulance, my father happened to be driving by, on his way home from work, and saw my unmistakable polka-dot bike on the side of the road, its frame crushed and mangled, the milk crate and the transistor radio smashed. He fainted at the wheel and nearly crashed, too.

I’ve been hit more times since—doored, mainly, though that’s enough to cost you your life if you fall into traffic. J. K. Rowling’s left stiletto once nearly ended me; she swung open the door of a stretch limo and stepped out, pelican-legged, just as I was cruising by. I veered into traffic to avoid running over her foot and almost got mowed down by a bus. It doesn’t matter how cautious you are on a bike. Cars and trucks can kill you just by bumping into you. People in my city are killed by trucks every year. After my first crash, my mother made me get a helmet. Jack, by then, had started fixing up cars. Sheet metal, rivets, Rust-Oleum, body wax, timing belts. He gave me his last bike, even though it was way too tall for me. I painted it and took it to college, where I got hit on College Avenue.

The biggest bicycle boom in American history, after the one in the eighteen-nineties, took place in the nineteen-seventies, even before the gas crisis. On the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, bicycling activists staged protests all over the country. In San Jose, they buried a Ford. Later, in Chicago, they held a “pedal-in.” Bike sales rose from nine million in 1971 to fourteen million in 1972, and more than half of those sales were to adults. Time announced a national bicycle shortage. “Look Ma, No Cars” was the motto of the New York-based group Action Against Automobiles in 1972. “Give Mom a Bike Lane,” a placard read at a bike-in rally in San Francisco that year. The following year, as Carlton Reid reported in “ Bike Boom: The Unexpected Resurgence of Cycling ” (2017), more than two hundred pieces of bike legislation, including proposals to establish bike lanes, were introduced in forty-two states. In 1972, 1973, and 1974, bicycles outsold cars. Within a few years, though, the automobile lobby had bulldozed its way through state legislatures, and most proposals for bicycle infrastructure had been abandoned; by the time I was in college, in the nineteen-eighties, the boom was at an end.

Not for me. I biked through every last bicycle fad, with the same abandon with which, at age nine, I saved up S & H Green Stamps to buy a unicycle. In the nineteen-nineties, I got a used mountain bike. I traded it in for a hybrid. In London, I bought a folding bike. When I got married, my husband and I rented a tandem, and then decided to keep it. When our oldest kids were toddlers, we hitched a trailer to the rear wheel, and attached a construction-orange flag to the trailer, to wave a warning to cars, a prayer. Our family of bicycles kept growing. Today, two unicycles hang from hooks in our bike shed, relics of another bike-fanatic child.

The latest bicycle boom began with the pandemic. In March of 2020, New York City declared bicycle-repair shops “essential businesses.” Pop-up bicycle lanes opened in cities all over the world. Roads were closed to cars and opened for bicycles. In the U.S., more than half the bicyclists riding for the first time during the pandemic, or returning to it, were women. More people riding bikes meant more bicycle accidents—the rate of them doubled. More than a quarter of cars that hit and killed bicyclists left them there to die alone. Bike lanes, bike shares, new bike-safety laws: the rate of bicycle fatalities keeps going up all the same. Cars and trucks refuse to yield. The bike boom of the pandemic, Rosen argues, was a lot like the worldwide rewilding. Bears on street corners, cougars on cul-de-sacs, bicycles on highways. These things happened. Briefly.

“Traffic, for all intents and purposes, is back to about 2019 levels,” the head of highways in my state declared in June of 2021. The cars came back. By the end of that year, the bicycle boom had gone bust. “I don’t think a lot of Americans are aware . . . how far behind we are on bicycle and pedestrian safety,” Pete Buttigieg, the U.S. Secretary of Transportation, said. Republicans warned, “Democrats are coming for your cars.” No one is coming for your cars.

Meanwhile, I am avoiding the inevitable e-bike. I still ride my very, very old Bad Boy, slowpoke and getting slower every year, towing a trailer to carry books, a radio bolted to the handlebars, rusting. ♦

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