Route 66: The First 100 Years Hardcover – May 22, 2025

• Named one of the top 10 travel books of 2025 by Smithsonian Magazine. • Listed on the Summer Reading List by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.• No. 1 selling nonfiction book in Oklahoma, July 2025.• Centennial Certified by the U.S. Route 66 Centennial Commission.Buckle up and take a generational journey with acclaimed Route 66 ambassadors Jim Ross and Shellee Graham as they time travel through the legendary highway’s life, demise, and renaissance. Explore the route from its birth in 1926 through its centennial, and experience the events, people, and places that created the legacy ensuring America’s Mother Road a place in the hearts and minds of the nation. As the world’s most famous highway, Route 66 conjures up images of dreamers, road-trippers, migrants, and nomads. On a deeper level, it is a story of escape, triumph, deliverance, and adventure during the best and worst of times. From the dawn of the auto age to surviving the Great Depression and Dust Bowl years to memorable mid-century family vacations, destinies were played out on the route, leaving indelible impressions on millions. Those pilgrimages, embedded in our history, continue today, undertaken by millions more seeking to follow the same path and reimagine those times. Ladies of legend, the influence of Indigenous America, neon-splashed boulevards, tourist traps, motor courts, trading posts, and heroes both remembered and forgotten—all these and more await discovery between these covers. Beautifully illustrated with hundreds of photographs, many of them vintage, the saga of Route 66 is uniquely told in a compelling narrative that celebrates the centennial of the route and pays homage to all whose lives were shaped or changed by this wondrous road. Route 66—The First 100 Years, with a foreword by Pulitzer Prize–nominated author Michael Wallis (Route 66: The Mother Road), is crafted from three decades of traveling, photographing, and writing about the route by Ross and Graham. Previous books by them include Route 66 Sightings, Tales from the Coral Court, Route 66 Crossings, and Secret Route 66. Read more