Slate has a wonderful slide show on the historic road trip of Robert Frank: Robert Frank’s The Americans.

In the summer of 1955, Robert Frank, a 30-year-old Jewish Swiss émigré, set out on a nearly yearlong car trip across America with his handheld Leica camera and a Guggenheim Fellowship “to see,” as he put it, “what is invisible to others.” In 1959, Grove Press published The Americans, his book of 83 carefully chosen snapshots from that journey. Initially a flop, it is now regarded as a landmark of modern photography.

The rest of the essay by Fred Kaplan is really worth reading.

Amazon has the latest version of this historic book: The Americans (Hardcover).