author
Effie Price Gladding
A lively early motorist and travel writer, she turned a groundbreaking 1914 cross-country drive into one of the best-known firsthand books about the Lincoln Highway.
1 Audiobook
Across the Continent by the Lincoln Highway
by Effie Price Gladding
About the author
Born in 1865 and remembered as an American travel writer, she is best known for Across the Continent by the Lincoln Highway, a book based on a 1914 trip across the United States with her husband, Thomas. The journey helped capture what long-distance automobile travel looked like in the early days of the road, when a transcontinental drive was still an adventure.
Her writing is often noted in connection with the Lincoln Highway itself, and later accounts of the road still point to her book as an important firsthand record. Sources also connect her with the early Lincoln Highway movement beyond the trip itself, noting that she wrote a foreword for one of the association's early guides aimed at women motorists.
Effie Price Gladding died in 1947. Reliable biographical details about her personal life are fairly limited online, but her reputation has lasted through this vivid travel narrative and its window into the beginnings of American car culture.