After ten years in England, American writer Bill Bryson 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 fibres. He discovered a continent that was doubly lost; lost to itself because blighted by greed, pollution, mobile homes and television; 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.