R. W. Flint notes that Simpson once told an interviewer that "[i]t's the timidity of suburban life that is so limiting." Timidity aside, Simpson has become a poet of the middle class, at times even heroizing the characters that people his poems. These characters shop, gossip, commute, and go on summer vacations. It is a life Simpson knows well. While contemporaries like Allen Ginsberg were composing loud, often surrealist, poems that screamed out against the conformity of middle-class, mid-century suburban American life, Simpson was busy crafting quiet poems of understatement and wit. At the time Simpson was writing the poems that make up At the End of the Open Road, the United States was in the midst of a post-war economic expansion. Beginning in the late 1940s, returning World War II veterans flooded the country and helped to create a new market for inexpensive housing...