There’s still time this summer to hit the highways and see America. For those looking for a grand adventure straight from the pages of some of literature’s most beloved tales, the folks at Atlas Obscura.com have created an interactive map that details road trips from 12 popular novels and memoirs.
“I am a freak for the American road trip. And I’m not alone, as some of this country’s best writers have taken a shot at describing that quintessentially American experience,” writes Richard Kreitner, who researched the routes, while Steven Melendez created an interactive map.
The map “includes every place-name reference in 12 books about cross-country travel, from Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872) to Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (2012), and maps the authors’ routes on top of one another. You can track an individual writer’s descriptions of the landscape as they traveled across it, or you can zoom in to see how different authors have written about the same place at different times.”
To be included on the list of “American literature’s most epic road trips,” Kreitner says, “a book needed to have a narrative arc matching the chronological and geographical arc of the trip it chronicles. It needed to be nonfictional, or, as in the case of On the Road, at least told in the first-person.”
The following passed the test:
Wild, Cheryl Strayed. 2012.
The Cruise of the Rolling Junk, F. Scott Fitzgerald. 1934.
Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails With America’s Hoboes, Ted Conover. 1984.
A Walk Across America, Peter Jenkins. 1979.
Cross Country: Fifteen Years and 90,000 Miles on the Roads and Interstates of America with Lewis and Clark, Robert Sullivan. 2006.
The Lost Continent, Bill Bryson. 1989.
Blue Highways: A Journey into America, William Least Heat Moon. 1982.
On the Road, Jack Kerouac. 1957.
Roughing It, Mark Twain. 1872.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig. 1974.
Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck. 1962.
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe. 1968.
Click here to read Atlas Obscura’s full story and see the interactive map.
From the Rural Blog and Atlas Obscura