While driving alone across the country in his 1941 Chevy, Kirchner contemplated the journeys undertaken by the central character, Eugene Gant, in Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and the River. Early in the novel, Eugene, a thinly disguised autobiographical portrait of Wolfe as a young man, travels by train from his home in the South to the “tower-masted island of Manhattan,” and although the distance is only seven hundred miles, “so relative are the qualities of space and time, and so complex and multiple their shifting images, that in the brief passage of this journey one may live a life, share instantly in 10,000,000 other ones, and see pass before his eyes the infinite panorama of shifting images that make a nation’s history.” This passage illustrates one of Wolfe’s principal themes, Eugene’s gradual comprehension of America and growing insight into what it means to be an American. Wolfe’s virtuosity at communicating sensual experiences with words inspired and influenced Kirchner, who, during this and many subsequent transcontinental journeys (many of which were by train or car) gathered the impressions—sights, sounds, odors, and emotions—that led to his personal vision of America.

Of Time and the River, however, is a Bildungsroman, and thus its central theme is the young protagonist’s—Wolfe’s—lonely search for meaning, for his deepest nature as he matures. The novelist-hero finally discovers this through the artistic process itself. Thus, it was an easy and seductive leap of the imagination for Kirchner to view his life through Wolfe’s fictional prism and to identify with Eugene, who experienced more than his environment during his journey. Travel also provides opportunity for penetrating introspection, and Eugene sensed a