This chapter reconsiders the road novel, not as a genre of Americanness and the frontier West, but rather as the privileged genre of US hegemony. Specifically, the chapter argues that the road novel does important work in critically mapping the expanding and shifting commodity frontiers of US hegemony, but through the lens and ideologies of automobility and what Matthew Huber has identified as the petro-driven ‘American way of life.’ To illustrate these claims, “Oil, Commodity Frontiers and the Materials of the Road Novel” offers a brief survey of three emblematic road novels that emerged during crucial moments of capitalist transition within the arc of US hegemony: Jack Kerouac’s paradigmatic western road novel, On the Road (1956) and the petroization of American life, Iva Pekárková’s post-socialist transition road novel, Truck Stop Rainbows (1989), and Samantha Schweblin’s neo-developmentalist soya-frontier road novel, Fever Dreams (2017). Taken together, the chapter reads the road novel as following the arc of US hegemony.