I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to. As soon as Bill Bryson was old enough, he left. Des Moines couldn't hold him, but it did lure him back. After ten years in England, he returned to the land of his youth and drove almost 14,000 miles in search of a mythical small town called Amalgam, the kind of trim and sunny place where the films of his youth were set. Instead, his search led him to Anywhere, USA, a lookalike strip of gas stations, motels, and hamburger outlets populated by lookalike people with a penchant for synthetic fibers. He discovered a continent that was doubly lost to itself, blighted by greed, pollution, mobile homes, and television, and lost to him because he had become a stranger in his own land. Bryson's acclaimed first success, The Lost Continent, is a classic of travel literature—hilariously, stomach-achingly funny, yet tinged with heartache—and the book that first staked Bill Bryson's claim as the most beloved writer of his generation.