A Walk Across America is the first book written by travel author Peter Jenkins.
Written in 1979, it depicts his journey from Alfred, New York to New Orleans, Louisiana. His second book, A Walk Across America: The Walk West tells of the second half of his trip.
Peter Jenkins begins his trip because he has a jaded view of America after the time of the Vietnam War; its realities and the viewpoint that the American dream is not really real any more. He wants to learn the truth about his country and its people. Along his journey, he and his dog Cooper meet the common American of the towns and regions he travels through and stops to visit and work in. They range from the likes of Homer, a mountain man living a life of self-sufficiency on Chatam Hill, Virginia to a simple black family in Murphy, North Carolina and on to George Wallace, the Governor of Alabama. Peter's journey leads him from the fields of the back country in the Northeast to the forested hills and mountains of the Appalachians and to the dirt yards and hard scrabble homes of the Deep South and onwards to the Antebellum homes of Dixie. He meets men he thinks will kill him because of their perception of him as a drug dealing hippie and motherly ladies who recognize the goodness in him and of his intentions (dogs don't lie). He quickly learns that the perception of men and conditions they create as offered by others often clashes with the reality of the experiences he encounters. He learns the American dream does reside in the men and women of America as he works beside them and accepts hospitality given to him.