“100 Years on the Road: The Traveling Salesman in American Culture”

Harold Hill, the charming con-artist hero of The Music Man, personifies one of America’s enduring icons -- the fast- talking, glad-handing traveling salesman. Not every turn-of- the-century “drummer” was a con man, of course, but, like Hill, he was in the business of peddling himself as much as any product. “Playing as many roles as his improvisational skills allowed,” writes Timothy B. Spears, “he brought vaudeville to Main Street.”

100 Years on the Road: The Traveling Salesman in American Culture (Yale University Press; 300 pages; $35) is Mr. Spears’s elegy on the world of the traveler. Focusing on the period from the Civil War, when the railroads made the drummer’s life possible, to the 1920’s, when mail-order houses and retail chains changed it forever, Mr. Spears looks especially at representations of the traveling salesman in high and low culture -- everything from Commercial Travelers Magazine to Death of a Salesman.

To Mr. Spears, an assistant professor of American literature and civilization at Middlebury College, the drummer is above all a transitional figure who ushered in the shift from “face- to-face” commerce to mass manufacturing and retailing. The roads are still full of traveling salesmen, but they no longer play such a critical role in connecting American business with its customers.