This Map Shows The Ultimate Literary Road Trips Across America

Richard Kreitner and Steven Melendez of Atlas Obscura have been busy bees of late. How so? Well they’ve put this awesome literary road trip map of America together.

According to Kreitner, ‘The map is the result of a painstaking and admittedly quixotic effort to catalog the country as it has been described in the American road-tripping literature.’ And what a thing of beauty it is.

The colourful, and very detailed piece of digital cartography includes place-name references to 12 American books that focus on the theme of cross-country travel.

The fab piece of work even includes literary escapades that reach the shores of Hawaii!

From Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872) to Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (2012), there’s tons of trips on the map you can try out for yourself. Best thing is, it even includes the author’s descriptions of the landscapes you’ll be travelling through, so you can follow along as you traverse the same challenging terrains the authors and their characters did.

See the full digital version here.

And if you fancy buying a copy of one of the books included in the map, check out the full literary list below.
Cheryl Strayed, Wild, 2012.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Cruise of the Rolling Junk, 1934.
Ted Conover, Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails With America’s Hoboes, 1984.
Peter Jenkins, A Walk Across America, 1979.
Robert Sullivan, Cross Country: Fifteen Years and 90,000 Miles on the Roads and Interstates of America with Lewis and Clark, 2006.
Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent, 1989.
William Least Heat Moon, Blue Highways: A Journey into America, 1982.
Jack Kerouac, On the Road, 1957.
Mark Twain, Roughing It, 1872.
Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 1974.
John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley, 1962.
Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, 1968.
Love maps? This one shows you when we’re all going to die!