Published a year before his signature work Main Street, and a precursor to the publication of Jack Kerouac's On the Road over three decades later, Sinclair Lewis' 1919 novel Free Air captures the spirit of a new freedom that was changing American life. The motorcar was now allowing people from all corners of society to escape the lives they were born into and enabling them to experience a new kind of freedom-mobility-in the wide open spaces of the American road. Sinclair's two young protagonists-Claire Boltwood of aristocratic Brooklyn Heights, and Milt Daggett of small-town Minnesota-discover this new freedom on the still rugged and wild American roads, and with each westward mile they become less inclined to return to the lives which at first they do not even realize they are trying to escape. But it becomes clear when they are off the road that these are lives that they no longer wish to live, and that the only place they can truly be free is the road that stretches beyond the societies that had been confining them. This edition includes a foreword written in 2017 by Edward Chidlington III titled "The New American Freedom", which attributes Free Air to being the first literary work to portray the freedom of the road that Americans would discover in the following decades, from Free Air to On the Road, from Harley Davidson motorcycle clubs to the Grateful Deadheads, from RV retirees to the tiny house movement in which people now want to take their homes on the road with them.