Like so many of Woolf's odysseys into the heart of America's
subcultures, ?Wall to Wall?traces a modern?Ulysses?in reverse: from a
West Coast asylum where he works as an attendant to a Boston asylum
where he visits his mother, Claude Squires views roadside America from
its weak side--the tough underbelly of the Southwest, Tucson, the Rio
Grande, Nogales, The Border--before thrusting himself into Okie's sacred
shrine, Oklahoma City, and into the staid Eastern Corridor that ends in
Boston. Claude's vehicle is a '59 Thunderhead, a female beast, which his
father, a used-car dealer in L.A., has commissioned him to deliver to
Oklahoma City. And like all of Woolf's cars, the Thunderhead is a she, a
domineering companion in Claude's cross-country picaresque flight of
passage. In Wall to Wall Woolf's view is evocative and is very much his
own. First published by Grove Press in 1962, Wall to Wall has been an
underground classic for over thirty-five years, a comic and satiric
masterpiece.