The celebrated Route 66 turns 100 in 2026. It’s a milestone worth noting because the fabled highway captured the spirit of the age when car culture came to America.

Ever since Henry Ford began mass-producing his revolutionary Model T and made car ownership accessible to the middle class, Americans have been engaged in a love affair with automobiles and, in a much larger sense, with the enduring myth of the open road. Has there ever been a culture that extolled movement for the sake of movement as fervently as 20th century America?

And Route 66 was the epitome of that. The highway was referred to as the “Mother Road‘ by novelist John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath. An oft-covered song by Bobby Troup identified Route 66 as the place to get your kicks. In American culture the road that ran from Chicago through Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and finally to Los Angeles was much more than a way to get from point A to point B. 

In 1947, Andreas Feininger made a photograph that might be the single most perfect picture ever made of Route 66. It is beautiful, of course, but it is also a remarkable distillation of an idea: namely, that the American West is a place where people find themselves, or lose themselves, amid heat, sun, open spaces, enormous skies.

(Note that the version of the photo at the top of this story was cropped to fit the page template, but below you can appreciate the image in its uncropped, open-sky glory.)

Feininger’s photograph, taken in Seligman, Arizona,  is packed with “information”—cars, a bus, human figures, a gas station, a garage, towering clouds, an arrow-straight ribbon of road to the horizon—but it’s the emptiness of the space that is most attractive. It can be read as a metaphor for the blank slate that innumerable people have sought in the West. Here is where you can redefine yourself, the scene suggests. Reimagine yourself. Reinvent yourself. Then keep moving. 

Like the American West itself or like the mythical West of our collective dreams, Feininger’s Route 66 feels both companionable and limitless. 

Ben Cosgrove is the Editor of LIFE.com

Route 66, here shown in Seligman, Arizona in 1947, took on a special romance for those who yearned to strike out for adventure.

Andreas Feininger The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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