© Ed Ruscha.īut Ruscha’s drive straight out of high school was born of neither wanderlust nor economic anxiety rather, it was spurred by a desire for new prospects beyond the limitations of Oklahoma City. The trail from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles via Route 66 holds a mythic place within the lore of the American West, from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road-typed in 1951 and published in September 1957, a full year after Ruscha and Williams’s journey-to John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), in which the author framed the trip from Oklahoma to California as one driven by drought and depression.
